Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

i
Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

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HEROIC BODIES
IN ANCIENT
ISRAEL
zz
BRIAN R. DOAK
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1
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xvii
1. Bodies and Heroes 1

Describe the Body 2
Religion and the Body: A Brief Genealogy 7
Embodied Biblical Studies 13
Body Trajectories in Recent Hebrew Bible Research 17
Define the Hero 23
An Orientation to Comparative Moves 26
2. Jacob: Israel’s Heroic Body 33
The Body Is the Nation Is the Land 33
The Body of the Patriarch 38
Hairy and Smooth, Part One (Genesis 25:21–26) 38
Hairy and Smooth, Part Two (Genesis 27:1–40) 41
Hairy and Smooth Bodies in Comparative Perspective 47
Hip Wrenching 50
Disabling Wound 53
Heroic Wound 55
Conclusion: A Criss-Crossed Body 57
3. Heroic Bodies in Judges 59
Torn Bodies, Torn Nations 59
Heroic Bodies in Judges 66
Judges 1:1–7: Adoni-Bezek’s Dismembered Body 66
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vi Contents
Judges 3:15–30: Ehud the Left-Hander, Eglon the Fat King 70

Judges 4:4–24: Deborah and Jael 80
Judges 13–16: Samson 86
Conclusion: The Concubine, the Left Hand, and the Body of
Israel 94
4. The Iconography of the Heroic Body 97
Material Exegesis of the Heroic Body 97
The Iconography of Heroic Bodies in and around Israel 107
Heroic Burials and Warrior Weaponry 118
Conclusion: Displaying the Body 123
5. The Height of Saul and the Beauty of David 125
Where Are the Bodies of Israel’s Kings? 125
The Heroic Body of Saul 130
Tall Body 130
Hidden Body, Frenzied Body 136
Scene One: Small and Desirable (1 Samuel 9:3–26) 137
Scene Two: Anointed and Frenzied (1 Samuel 9:27–10:16) 139
Scene Three: Hiding in the Baggage (1 Samuel 10:17–11:13) 140
Scene Four: Small in His Own Eyes (1 Samuel 15:17) 142
Further Scenes: Hiding, Disguising, Cutting, and Other
Displays 143
Interlude: Goliath’s Giant Body 146
The Heroic Body of David 148
Young and Beautiful Body 148
Beautiful Bodies in Genesis 152
David’s Beautiful Ruddy Body 155
Dismembering and Manipulating Bodies 158
Dismemberment and Corpse Movement 159
Fake Bodies 161
Conclusion: Two Bodies 162
6. Saul’s Heroic Bones 165
Saul, Again 165
Interpretations and Sources 168
Heroic Bone Transfer in the Western Mediterranean and
Beyond 170
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Contents vii
Bone Transfer in the Saul Narrative 174

Part One: The Gileadites Transfer the Body 176
Part Two: David and the Bone Transfer 178
Conclusion: An Ongoing Body of Power 182
7. Conclusion: Heroic Bodies Reimagined 185
Index of Modern Authors (Selected) 193

Index of Subjects 197
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ix
Figures
3.1 Philistine bichrome vessel with painted figures

(warrior fighting monster?) 91
4.1 Relief of Assurnasirpal II (ninth century bce);
Assyria; British Museum 100
4.2 The Narmer Palette; side A at left, side B at right;
c. 3200–3000  bce 101
4.3 The Hunter’s Palette; c. 3200–3000 bce 102
4.4 The Naram-Sîn stele; late fourth millennium bce 103
4.5 Two heroes killing a victim; Old Babylonian terra
cotta plaque 105
4.6 Two heroes killing a victim; Neo-Assyrian
cylinder seal impression 106
4.7 At left: front and side view, deity in “striking
pose”; Megiddo; at middle, the “Anatolian”
type with two arms extended at hip; Byblos; at
right: the “Egyptian” type, with one arm extended
at hip and other hand at side; Byblos 108
4.8 Striking figures on seals (three examples
at left) and plaques (four examples at right).
The images here (from left to right) are from
location unknown; location unknown (possibly
Phoenician); Beth-shan (Israel/Palestine); Minet
el-Beida (Syrian coast); Egypt; Deir el-Medina
(Egypt); Zagazig (eastern Nile delta). See captions
in Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 158. 109
4.9 Seated goddess wielding axe and spear on
throne; thirteenth–twelfth century bce 109
x
x Figures
4.10 Anat or Astarte (?) on damaged stele;

thirteenth–twelfth century  bce 110
4.11 Baal Stele from Ugarit; Late Bronze Age 111
4.12 Tell Ahmar stele with Storm God and Luwian
inscription; tenth–ninth century bce 112
4.13 Striking warrior figures from Megiddo: at
left, bronze figure from Late Bronze grave at
Megiddo (13 cm), possibly Resheph; at center,
painted ostracon with bearded human warriors;
at right, group of warriors from a zoomorphic
clay vessel (curved around neck of an animal) 113
4.14 At left: Pharaoh on chariot with bow in active
warfare; at right: triumphant Pharaoh with
captive enemies (Tell el-Far’ah [south]); both
c. thirteenth century bce 114
4.15 Ivory plaque with seated king, captives, and
warrior on chariot; Megiddo; Late Bronze Age 115
4.16 Incised image of figure battling lion; Gezer;
mid-first millennium  bce 115
4.17 Three spear-wielding figures; Tell el-Far’ah
(south); fifth century bce 116
4.18 Typical set of warrior weaponry from Middle
Bronze Age “warrior burial”; Tell Rehov 120
4.19 Middle Bronze warrior burial from Gesher
(grave 13) with axe and spearhead 121
4.20 Artist’s reconstruction of warrior burial from
Kabri (Western Galilee) 122
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Preface
The bodies of a people encode and continually retell the story of their
families, cities, and nations—a fact no less true for the ancient world than
it is today. We want to look at certain bodies, and not at others. Some
bodies win, and some bodies lose. Whether we tear up bodies and throw
them away, groom them to subtle or extreme effects, or idealize some
bodies and present them as icons for all to see, we gaze upon bodies and
read them according to the codes of our language, our visual index, and
the psychology of our cultures. Bodies speak.
This book is about the way certain kinds of bodies are presented and
described in the Hebrew Bible (Christian “Old Testament”). The ancient
Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible skewed toward their eastern
neighbors, in the heart of Mesopotamia, rather than Egypt, on the ques-
tion of “souls” and an afterlife: whereas Egyptians imagined a baroque
picture of the soul and its journeys outside the body, Israel seems to have
been much more reticent on the topic, focused on the earthly, tangible,
here-and-now body as the focus of joy, pain, and all of God’s blessings or
curses. Even at a very late historical period on the terms of the Hebrew
Bible, perhaps in the fourth or third century bce, the author of Ecclesiastes
famously quipped that he had heard of the idea that people have a “spirit”
(ruach) that rises upward at death, but simply didn’t know whether that
was real (Eccl 3:21). Even the most common Hebrew word often translated
as “soul,” nephesh, has as its most fundamental meaning a body-part: the
neck, and the physical breath that travels through it.
Numerous bodies populate the pages of the Hebrew Bible, with thou-
sands of possible images available for analysis—divine bodies, female
bodies, male bodies, conceptual bodies, individual and corporate bodies,
young and old bodies; eyes, ears, hands, feet, heads, blood, and bone.
Because of my own fascination with specifically heroic literature in the an-
cient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, in this study I’ve chosen to
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xii Preface
narrow my focus down to the explicitly described bodies of heroic figures

in the Hebrew Bible—specifically defining the “hero” as one dwelling at
the intersection of warrior activity and leadership (e.g., kings, tribal leaders,
and founding figures). Ancient Israel produced heroic literature, and that
literature deserves to be labeled as such and belongs in the company of
the great heroic literature from the ancient world. As I define the terms,
these heroes are often males (Jacob, most of the Judges, Saul, and David),
but not always; Jael engages in particularly gritty bodily-heroic action in
Judges 4–5, and the alluring and dangerous beauty of the matriarchs in
Genesis must also be considered. Because so much illuminating work has
already been done on the female body, I make no apology for treating these
male bodies as I do—maleness, as much as femaleness, is bodily and con-
structed and complicated and deserves attention in its own right.
I consider this project to be something of a follow-up to the inter-
ests expressed in my first book, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and
Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Ilex Foundation and the
Center for Hellenic Studies, via Harvard University Press, 2012), a
lightly revised version of my 2011 Harvard University dissertation of the
same title. There, I tried to present the Bible’s giants as a symbolically
generative group, and argued that in their giant bodies Israel encoded
many values— about politics, religious boundaries, and historiog-
raphy. As with those giant bodies, here too I want to point out the ways
that Israel “read” bodies and saw in them meanings of many kinds.
In every text under consideration, I am at least implicitly asking some
of the following questions, and I invite readers to ask these questions
as well: Where and how is the heroic body portrayed as powerful, de-
graded, unique, and efficacious? Does the body directly contribute to the
hero’s rise and success? Does the body signal the hero’s downfall? Is the
body deceptive?
Several major arguments emerge throughout this study (explained
more fully in Chapter 1, and then developed for specific cases throughout
the ensuing chapters): the Hebrew Bible’s bodies join a heroic corpus com-
parable in the ancient Mediterranean world only to the Iliad and Odyssey
for depth of bodily engagement, and these bodies tell deeply social and
national stories by way of engaging a form of “body determinism” or “nar-
rative physiognomy.” I define the “hero” specifically as one who performs
at the intersection of warrior activity and formal leadership (e.g., a “king”
or a “judge”), including those who function as “founding figures” (such as
the ancestors in Genesis).
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Preface xiii
With regard to the question of method, particularly regarding the ten-

sion between “historical” and “literary” readings: I’ve found it difficult to
discern clear historical changes relating to the body among sources or
layers of texts within a discrete work such as, say, the book of Judges. I’m
deeply convinced that these texts are all, to one degree or another, histor-
ically composite, but to a similar extent I admit to being put off by cava-
lier theses about not so much where these divisions may occur but rather
why sources appear as they do and when and how they got that way. For
these latter issues, we have no good evidence. Thus, though I could have
made analyses on source-critical grounds in certain cases, constructing
elaborate authorial or editorial arguments regarding the bodies I analyze
here would seem, to me, like needlessly confusing and compounding
an already difficult problem. This is why for the most part I resort to ge-
neric nomenclature such as “author,” “narrator,” “stories,” and so on. The
largely “literary” approach I have adopted in most chapters seems well-
suited to investigating the basic question at hand, i.e., concerning the way
ancient authors chose to write about how heroic bodies looked and acted.
However, there is one broad and clear historical trajectory I do see: the
decline of the heroic body in obviously postexilic texts. And I assume that
attention to bodies in Judges and Samuel, in particular, reflects real con-
cerns about national unity and leadership situated in the living historical
reality of early Israel in the twelfth–tenth centuries bce.
✢ ✢ ✢
In summary, the book proceeds as follows: In Chapter 1, I examine

some problems of the literary representation of the body in ancient texts—
why did authors so seldom describe bodies?—and trace some key lines of
theory and past scholarship relating to the rubric of “bodies.” I begin anal-
ysis of the first heroic body in Chapter 2 with Jacob, the ancestor whose
body stands out for its tricks, misidentification, and wounding. Because
Jacob is also assigned the name of the nation itself, Israel, he makes an
appropriate place to begin thinking about the way an individual and na-
tional body may communicate with one another. Chapter 3 examines
many bodies in Judges, noting the way that these unorthodox and torn
figures mirror the social body of Israel on the cusp of establishing a proper
nation in the land. I then take a detour into a very different approach in
Chapter 4, sketching out some ways that heroic bodies could be presented
iconographically in and around Israel. If nothing else, the existence and
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placement of this iconography chapter is an archaeological affirmation

that these texts found a living audience that valued heroic bodily themes
in the Iron Age, and at least the textual warrior culture of heroism extolled
in the Hebrew Bible had some material reality. Chapters 5 and 6 function
together to examine the bodies of Saul and David, the two kings on whom
almost all of the Bible’s monarchic bodily musings are placed. The short
conclusion in Chapter 7 offers a summary of the study as a whole and
raises the problem of the loss or transformation of the heroic body after
Saul and David and on into early Judaism.
In no way is this book meant to be a catalogue of every possible ap-
pearance of a character that could be remotely considered a “hero” along
with every time that hero’s “body” appears in any way in the text. Alert
readers should find more avenues for thinking about this material than
I have chosen to deal with or noticed. Having finished this project, I’m
left haunted by avenues unpursued, questions unanswered, and doors left
open. As this is the only study of its type and scope that I know of thus far
on the “heroic body” in ancient Israel, my modest hope is that a synthesis
of materials can spark new readings in many directions.
All translations from Hebrew and other languages in this book are
my own, unless otherwise noted. Those who read Semitic languages
should already know the technical aspects of various words discussed in
the text, and those who don’t get no clear benefit from technical trans-
literations. Therefore, when citing ancient languages other than English
in more general discussions, I use non-specialized transliterations (e.g.,
raqia instead of rāqîa’, or for its ancient Greek translation, stereoma instead
of steréōma, etc.; I make no differentiation, if adding an apostrophe into
a term, whether an aleph or ayin is represented). However, when some
specific aspect of the language plays a crucial role for interpretation, the
transliterations will be as technical as necessary. Rather than listing a full
Bibliography in the back matter, I’ve opted for full citations within the
footnotes of each chapter—the first time a source is listed, then short-form
after that—and then a selected index of authors cited.
✢ ✢ ✢
Chapter 6 first appeared as a small seed of an idea in my dissertation-

in-progress (in 2009), then as a presentation at the Society of Biblical
Literature annual meeting in 2010, and subsequently as a journal article,
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Preface xv
in the Harvard Theological Review in 2013. I’m grateful for permission to

reproduce the bulk of that article here. I first presented Chapter 4 under
the title “The Iconography of the Heroic Body in Israel and Elsewhere in
the Ancient Near East” to the Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the
Bible program unit at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting
in Boston, in November of 2017, and I’m grateful for the feedback I re-
ceived there, particularly from Joel LeMon (Emory), Izaak de Hulster
(Helsinki), and some members of the audience that I could not identify
by name. I am grateful to Steve Wiggins, acquisitions editor at Oxford
University Press, who showed interest in this topic at an early phase
and graciously corresponded with me throughout the project’s develop-
ment and composition, and also to Nora Clair, a local artist and friend,
who produced the line drawings in Chapters 3 and 4. Jonathan Kaplan
(University of Texas, Austin) read a draft of every chapter as I wrote it, and
was thus my main motivational ally and academic friend throughout the
entire process. A colleague at George Fox University, Heather Ohaneson,
offered numerous and detailed suggestions on many fronts and made
this book much clearer and better than it would have been otherwise. Lisa
Cleath (George Fox University), Roger Nam (Portland Seminary), Suzie
Park (Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary), and Jeremy Schipper
(Temple) read selected portions of the manuscript and offered encourage-
ment, suggestions for sources, and other valuable feedback. I absolutely
hold all of these individuals responsible for anything the reader finds com-
pelling or useful in this study.
I dedicate this book to my father, Ron J. Doak, for his sixtieth birthday.
xvi
xvi
Abbreviations
AJA American Journal of Archaeology

BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BI Biblical Interpretation
BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
BW The Biblical World
CA Classical Antiquity
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CBR Currents in Biblical Research
CJ Classical Journal
COS The Context of Scripture, 3 vols., ed. W. W. Hallo
(Leiden: Brill, 2003)
HS Hebrew Studies
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JHS Journal of Hebrew Scriptures
JHellSt Journal of Hellenic Studies
JMMS Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality
JRH Journal of Religious History
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSSR Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
NTT Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly
PRS Perspectives in Religious Studies
PT Poetics Today
QS Quaderni di Semitistica
xvi
xviii Abbreviations
RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum

RL Religion & Literature
SJOT Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament
SSQ Social Science Quarterly
TDOT Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 15 vols.,
ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, et al.;
trans. J.T. Willis, et al. (Grand Rapids,Mich.: Eerdmans,
1974–2004)
VT Vetus Testamentum
ZAW Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDPV Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins
ZTK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
1
Bodies and Heroes
In this book I make three overarching arguments about what I am

calling the “heroic body” in ancient Israel, particularly as it is represented
in the Hebrew Bible but also including relevant iconography and with
comparative gestures toward the Bible’s larger Mesopotamian context to
the east and also the Greek Mediterranean context to the west:
(1) Biblical authors paid significant attention to the bodies of their heroes
(successful warriors in battle, founding figures, and kings), and saw
the heroic body as a primal source of meaning. Though differences
in genre skew any attempt at a rigorous numerical content analysis,
roughly it is fair to say that the Bible focuses on bodies more than
any other comparable ancient Near Eastern corpus and joins the
Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as the most robust heroic bodily text from
the ancient world.
(2) Ancient Israelite authors—and thus, we must presume, their earliest
audiences—participated in what we might call a kind of “body deter-
minism” or physiognomy. That is to say, they saw bodily features as
communicating, before and beyond a character’s actions or choices, a
coded message about that character’s story and ultimate fate. In other
words, a character’s fate can be read through his or her body.
(3) The heroic bodies in the Hebrew Bible can be read on multiple levels,
but, considered as individual stories within a more local context or
considered together as a group, they tell a story—narrating Israel’s
composition as a corporate and national body, with all of the ambi-
guity and problems bound up with that process, then the flourishing
of that body in royal exemplars, and then the dissolution of that
body. This body-story runs parallel to the national script told by the
2
2 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael
mainstream narrative of the Bible about the rise and fall of Israel as a
nation, making the body and the nation co-leading actors in the drama
of the Bible.
Describe the Body
One immediate obstacle facing this project involves the confusing reti-
cence of ancient authors to describe the physical bodies of characters
in anything like the detail contemporary readers might expect or desire.
Then again, it is not always the case that modern writing—especially good
writing—features exacting bodily descriptions. Indeed, many masterful
pieces of fiction describe their characters’ physicality in no overt way what-
soever, and many ancient works do refer to characters’ bodies. A parade
example of physical-descriptive reticence from the ancient world in the
Christian Bible is Jesus of Nazareth: the most famous human in history
and the one most frequently depicted artistically from the medieval period
through today received not one shred of narrative physical description in
any of the Gospels (and certainly no contemporary visual renderings), this
despite the fact that contemporary ancient biographies (e.g., the Roman
“Lives” genre, or Greek “Bioi”) did utilize physical character descriptions
in what most contemporary readers would consider “normal” ways.1
The most prominent literary products of the archaic Greek word, the
Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, utilized stock bodily images repeated at var-
ious points. Heroes are “shining,” “powerful,” and “huge”; women are
“white-armed,” “lovely haired,” and so on. These images are not stun-
ningly detailed, but they are present. One ancient scholiast on the Iliad
stated that Homer most frequently described characters through their fa-
cial expressions, perhaps indicating that he saw the face as the most im-
portant locus of physicality, though evidence for this in the text remains
scant.2 Still, heroes in the Iliad undergo vivid ordeals and transformations
1. This genre of ancient “biography” became particularly important after Constantine in the
fourth century ce (so Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography, expanded
edition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 9); for an overview of the genre,
see Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen (eds.), Writing Biography in Greece and
Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On Jesus’s physical appearance, see
Joan E. Taylor, What Did Jesus Look Like? (London: T & T Clark, 2018).
2. René Nünlist, The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek
Scholia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 254.
3
Bodies and Heroes 3
that highlight the body. Spears cut open the heroic bodies, spewing livers
and entrails out on the ground. We do not need to have a feature-by-feature
description of Hector’s face or arms or hair color to grasp the extreme
importance of his body as the epic closes. Mirroring and yet going be-
yond other struggles for the bodies of the dead in the Iliad, Achilles’s re-
fusal to give up Hector’s body, followed by the agreement reached between
Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24, serves as the final point of meditation on
the status of the heroic enterprise and the role of the body in that enter-
prise. The results of this meditation may be ambiguous for the reader—is
Homer ultimately endorsing the glory of war, or subverting it, or compli-
cating it? What is the relationship between the individual heroic body and
the polis? Whatever the case, the heroic body is the crucial point of focus.
In Mesopotamia, the very popular Gilgamesh Epic, at least as repre-
sented in the standard version (from the seventh century bce), describes
the hero’s body before any of the main narrative action begins in Tablet 1
(portions of which are broken in the extant tablets). In one sense, we see
the narrator going to great pains to emphasize certain things, but none
of these bodily descriptions would help us know anything about what
Gilgamesh was supposed to “actually” look like:3
Surpassing all other kings, hero endowed with a superb

physique . . . (I.29)
Gilgameš so tall, perfect and terrible . . . (I.37)
The goddess Bēlet-ilī drew the shape of his body, the god
Nudimmud brought his form to perfection . . . (I.49–50)
A triple cubit was his foot, half a rod his leg. Six cubits
was his stride . . . cubits the . . . of his . . . His cheeks were
bearded like those of . . . , the locks of his hair growing
thickly . . . As he grew up he was perfect in his beauty, by
human standards he was very handsome . . . (I.56–62)
3. Translation from Andrew George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical
Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), I, 539–43. After
the initial introduction, Gilgamesh is described as “perfect in strength” (I.211, 218). I have
removed brackets from the translations here where George reconstructed the text.
4
Later, when the fellow hero Enkidu arrives on the scene, the narrator de-
scribes him enough to convey the basics of his “wild man” appearance and
physical strength:4
All his body is matted with hair, he is adorned with tresses

like a woman: the locks of his hair grow as thickly as
Nissaba’s . . . (I.105–7)
Mightiest in the land, he possesses strength, his strength is as
mighty as a lump of rock from the sky (I.124–25)
After his sexual learning experience with the woman Šamḫat, Enkidu’s
body changes:5
Enkidu had defiled his body so pure, his legs stood still,
though his herd was on the move. Enkidu was diminished, his
running was not as before, but he had reason, he was wide of
understanding. (I.199–202)
You are handsome, Enkidu, you are just like a god . . . (I.207)
One simple reason for this descriptive lacuna in ancient literature in-
volves the economy of writing: ancient authors are not known to have
produced “art for art’s sake,” or to have given the reader lavish and or-
nate physical descriptions of anything beyond what is required to advance
the plot or provide essential information.6 In the case of Gilgamesh and
Enkidu, to know of Gilgamesh’s beauty and strength and size is to know
of his status as exemplary hero and king; to know that Enkidu was a wild
man but was transformed into the shining equal of Gilgamesh is to know
enough to see their fight, reconciliation, and journey as meaningful. The
bodies have to work together for the characters to work together.
Still, merely acknowledging the seemingly utilitarian feature of ancient
character description does not answer why ancient authors wrote like this.
Material considerations could play a role. Writing instruments and skilled
4. George, Gilgamesh Epic, I, 545.

5. George, Gilgamesh Epic, I, 551.
6. Jeremy Schipper, “Plotting Bodies in Biblical Narrative,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Biblical Narrative, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 389–
97, here 390–95, and “Body; II. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,” in The Encyclopedia of the
Bible and Its Reception, vol. 4, ed. Hans-Josef Klauck et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 269–74.
5
scribes were relatively rare and expensive. In the cuneiform literatures

broadly we tend not to find lengthy digressions into the details of land-
scape, psychological motivation, history, and so on (though at moments
such digressions were certainly possible), and even in texts written in the
more user-friendly script systems (i.e., the Canaanite-type alphabets) only
the Hebrew Bible has anything resembling “gratuitous” detail for charac-
ters or situations, and even here ornate descriptions are not exactly the
rule. Moreover, we should not mistake our contemporary image obsession
as a transhistorical principle. Mirrors were not common before the sev-
enteenth or eighteenth century of the Common Era, and their emergence
ushered in a host of psychological and personal consequences;7 mobile
phones with cameras pointing not only outward toward beautiful beach
scenes or trendy breakfast plates but backward, toward our own faces, and
the whole host of bodies on the internet and in print media have, to say
the least, made one’s appearance a more ubiquitous thing in recent times.
Having said all of this, sparse description can be an artistic technique,
even in ancient literature. Taking up a literary line of thought on the
Bible’s often enigmatic character descriptions, Adele Berlin discusses the
shadowy physicality of its protagonists in terms of the artistic technique
of suggestion: through only hints at a situation, the narrator invites the
audience into a world of imaginative projection.8 “Minimal representa-
tion can give maximum illusion,” and descriptions of “one outstanding
trait” can be “that magic line of suggestion around which the reader fills
in the picture.”9 This type of suggestion comports with Erich Auerbach’s
famous opening essay in Mimesis; he saw the biblical style as “fraught with
background,” leaving readers to wonder what bodies look like, what voices
sound like, what characters were doing before they appear on the scenes in
which they appear, and all manner of other haunted questions.10 Although
7. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. K. H. Jewett

(New York: Routledge, 2002).
8. Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
1994), 137–39; she elsewhere notes (Poetics, 34) that what we lack in the Hebrew Bible is not
so much any physical description of characters but rather detailed elaborations on the phys-
ical appearance of human beings—“we know that Bathsheba was beautiful but we have no
idea what she looked like.”
9. Berlin, Poetics, 137.
10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Thought, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; first published in 1946 by
Francke), “Odysseus’s Scar,” 3–23.
6
we are currently at a loss to say whether this type of style was intention-
ally cultivated by Iron Age storytellers, we do see it frequently enough to
suspect that it was at least an implied standard for communicating in the
narrative genre broadly.
When considering the heroic body in the Hebrew Bible, we must pay
attention not only to the obvious, explicit references to body parts but also
to the status of the heroic body as a whole and the meaning of the body in
a variety of circumstances. Thus, we may consider the textual descriptions
of bodies in this study on three horizons:
(1) The way bodies were described, whether general (calling a character
“beautiful”) or more specific (portraying a particular body part, or even
mentioning it).
(2) Descriptions of bodies in a more holistic manner, or the fate of bodies
as central elements in a narrative (e.g., a body is tossed in a ravine; a
body is killed in a gruesome manner; an individual is bodily humili-
ated, taken captive, or retrieved).
(3) A broader societal meaning, involving the “display and care” of the
body, ideas about the way it must look or where it must go, sexuality
and fertility, ritual, and many other factors encompassing the larger,
historically situated, social scene in which bodies are considered.11
To give an example I take up in detail later in this book, the first ho-
rizon appears in the description of Saul as a head taller than his contem-
poraries, while the second appears in the narrative of Saul’s dead remains
being transferred between various locales; the third involves the social
politics of David’s attempt to manage Saul’s corpse and the community’s
larger expectations about who should be king, where the king should be or
not be, and so on. The reference to height is an explicit cue, asking readers
to fixate on this aspect of Saul’s body as a site of meaning—an indication
of character, as foreshadowing, as irony, satire, and so on. The transfer of
Saul’s bones operates on another level but involves the literal physicality
of the king, without which the struggle—first between Israel and Philistia,
then between factions of Israelites—cannot occur and its symbolic reson-
ances fall flat. And running through all considerations of the body is a
11. I take a cue here from Mark Hamilton, The Body Royal: The Social Poetics of Kingship in
Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3.
7
larger level of social assumptions about bodies, exploding outward to the

broadest construction of all meaning about a “person” or “character.”
The body is therefore real and present in all cases, but on different
levels. While considering these varying horizons of reference, I have de-
liberately not allowed the focus to slip into either overly vague or atomistic
territory—for example, considering every reference to a character or that
character’s traits on any level as tantamount to a de facto focus on the
“body,” or dwelling on every minute reference to a “hand” or “eye” as if it
bears massive weight. In all cases, interpreters considering the body must
demonstrate the exact relevance of the body as a major factor in the text.
Religion and the Body: A Brief Genealogy

To understand why the current focus on the body has become fruitful and
necessary within the fields of religion, history, and literary studies broadly,
I want to trace something of the genealogy of body theorizing. A relentless
focus on the body, if improperly justified, may come off as a myopic obses-
sion with one category of existence or expression as opposed to so many
others that could receive attention. Why focus on the body as opposed
to ideas, or imagination, or descriptions of emotion, or any of the other
myriad aspects of textual characterization or existence? Does the body be-
come an unhelpfully all-encompassing term (are “emotions” not part of
the “body”? What about any action or thought or description?), or awfully
reductive, as if we must now view all subjects only through the lens of
clashing material objects, endlessly physical? Though it is impractical to
trace a comprehensive genealogy of the conversation about the body as a
site of religious meaning, a rehearsal of the contours of body-talk, culmin-
ating, for our purposes here, in the intersection of the body, religion, and
the hero, will begin to explain many crucial choices of interpretation in the
present study. I do not propose a novel reading of body theory here; rather,
I seek an intellectual and methodological ground for the investigations at
the heart of this book.
It has become almost perfunctory in such reviews to begin with
the grand original sin against the body in the modern period: In René
Descartes’s famous seventeenth-century meditation, the meditator severs
the body—indeed severs all senses and physical things—from the ability
to think (cogito).12 In the Cartesian mode, the body is a liar, or the body
12. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and
8
may believe the lies of some grand demonic deceiver. The results of this
line of thinking in Western philosophy and for the study of religion are
well known and resulted in manifold efforts to recover the corporeality of
human action. In the twentieth century, seminal thinkers for the sociology
of religion such as Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss opened up new
vistas for reflection on the role of the body, and a parade of the century’s
most prominent thinkers in fields ranging from sociology to philosophy,
linguistics, literary theory, religious studies, neuroscience, visual arts, and
more followed in their wake—for example, Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas,
Pierre Bourdieu, George Lakoff, and Catherine Bell, to name a few.
In the opening pages of his groundbreaking Les Formes élémentaires
de la vie religieuse (1912), Durkheim famously posited that religions “are
grounded in and express the real.”13 What is “real”? For Durkheim, society
is real, as expressed in his pithy summary of the entire book: “religion is
an eminently social thing.”14 At the heart of religion’s social things lie the
collective rituals of the group. The “totemic emblem,” around which the
group rallies, is “the visible body of the god,”15 and the “collective effer-
vescence” of the group grows heated, frantic, even “outlandish.” Within
this context “the religious idea seems to have been born.”16 Human bodily
action (cries, words, dancing, bowing) directed toward “the same object”
produces the social unity of religion’s substance.17 In the review of the
Australian tribes at the center of his ethnographic work, Durkheim finds
the soul-body duality a woefully incomplete expression of either the “soul”
or the “body,” as both elements assimilate into the other and depend upon
the other.18 For Durkheim, society itself would die if not specifically for the
corporeality of the group.19
Replies, rev. ed., trans. and ed. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996; originally published as Meditationes de prima philosophia; Paris: Michael Soly, 1641).
13. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. E. Fields (New York: Free
Press, 1995; originally published as Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système
totémique en Australie; Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 2.
14. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 9.
18. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 245–47.
19. Philip A. Mellor and Christ Shilling, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and
Modernity (London: SAGE, 1997), 1. Sociologists and religious studies theorists continue to
9
Nevertheless, Durkheim’s focus on “belief” as the ultimate center of

religion, with ritual (and thus the body) coming in second place,20 left to
others the task of elevating the body to its current place of importance
among theorists. Durkheim’s nephew and collaborator, Marcel Mauss,
took up the body—particularly bodily gestures—in an essay often cited
as one of the foundational documents in the sociology of the body, “Les
techniques du corps” (1936).21 Mauss began by noting the specific ways
in which our bodies are taught to do so many things in particular and
peculiar ways—to swim when we are children, to march in the infantry
as soldiers, or to walk with our hands open or closed or in other marked
gestures.22 Mauss spoke of these gestures as part of the individual’s habitus
(a term that would be taken up much more famously by Pierre Bourdieu
and defined as “the durably installed generative principle of regulated im-
provisations”),23 which is to say, the individual’s bodily habits as shaped by
society, education, and a host of other factors.24 Key words such as prestige,
mimicry, tradition, and authorization describe the formation of the body,
and the central naming of the body as the center of the discussion empha-
sized its importance:
debate the extent to which the body played a vital role in Durkheim’s work; on the recovery
of Durkheim’s emphasis on the body within sociology, see Mellor and Schilling, Re-forming,
1–4, as well as Kenneth Thompson, “Durkheim and Sacred Identity,” in On Durkheim’s
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ed. N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller
(London: Routledge, 2012), 92–104, esp. 99–101.
20. Ariel Wilkis characterizes Durkheim’s views on the body as “paradoxical,” since, on the
one hand, the body was very important for Durkheim, “but only in a very precise sense,” i.e.,
“as a metaphor,” not at the center of his sociology. “Thinking the Body. Durkheim, Mauss,
Bourdieu: The Agreements and Disagreements of a Tradition,” in Thinking the Body as a
Basis, Provocation and Burden of Life: Studies in Intercultural and Historical Contexts, ed. G.
Melville and C. Ruta (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 33–35.
21. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” trans. B. Brewster; reprinted in Marcel Mauss,
Techniques, Technology, and Civilisation, ed. N. Schlanger (New York: Durkheim Press/
Berghahn Books, 2006), 77–96; originally published as “Les techniques du corps,” Journal
de Psychologie 32.3–4 (1936): 271–93. See one recent and concise review of the Durkheim–
Mauss–Bourdieu trajectory in Wilkis, “Thinking the Body.” On Mauss, see, e.g., Carrie
Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/ Producing Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18–54 and Talal Asad, “Remarks on the Anthropology
of the Body,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 42–52, here 46–49.
22. Mauss, “Techniques,” 78–80.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 78.
24. Mauss, “Techniques,” 80.
01
In this case all that need be said is quite simply that we are dealing
with techniques of the body. The body is man’s first and most nat-
ural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments,
man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time
technical means, is his body.25
As such, the body is inextricably and arbitrarily bound up with one’s

place, with one’s total position within society and its complex network of
symbols on every level.26 In Talal Asad’s reading, Mauss’s goal was not
simply to imply that our physical gestures and meanings are culturally
determined—a fact already well-recognized even in Mauss’s time—but
rather to focus on notions of aptness and expert practice.27 Only by doing
this will we understand how bodies within specific contexts function as
primary, natural instruments, whose movements are learned and prac-
ticed, and not merely knowing that bodies do different things or respond
in supposedly “autogenic” ways to primordial impulses.28 To cite one more
mid-twentieth century interpreter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also notably ar-
gued in his major work Phenomenology of Perception (1945) for the “primacy
of perception” and claims that the body brings all “existence” into being it-
self, actualizing all that we are,29 thus emphasizing, like Mauss, the body’s
ability to create and work.30
Very much has occurred between Durkheim, Mauss, and Merleau-
Ponty in the early to mid- twentieth century and the current state of
25. Mauss, “Techniques,” 83.
26. See Wilkis, “Thinking the Body,” 37, for this emphasis on Mauss’s insistence on the arbi-
trary (i.e., social/relational, opposed to obligatory) nature of social phenomena.
27. Asad, “Remarks,” 46–47.
28. Asad, “Remarks,” 48.
29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomonology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1962), e.g., 408–409: “We
do not say that the notion of the world is inseparable from that of the subject, or that the sub-
ject thinks himself inseparable from the idea of his body and the idea of the world; for, if it
were a matter of no more than a conceived relationship, it would ipso facto leave the absolute
independence of the subject as thinker intact, and the subject would not be in a situation.
If the subject is in a situation, even if he is no more than a possibility of situations, this is
because he forces his ipseity [individual identity] into reality only by actually being a body,
and entering the world through a body. . . . We are in the world, which means that things
take shape.”
30. On this point, see also Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996), 71.
11
scholarship employing “body theory” in some capacity. The anthropolo-

gist Mary Douglas, also working in the Durkheimian vein, saw the body
as dually expressed—a “social body” and a “physical body”—and wrote
persuasively about the way societies constrain the appearance, grooming,
and ideals of the body.31 The body is the most primary “natural symbol,”
and the society’s values are acted out on the individual in this respect.
At various points in the chapters that follow in this book, I seize upon
Douglas’s argument about the relationship between a “social body” and an
individual, physical body: “The social body constrains the way the physical
body is perceived.”32
Even as late as 1990, however, the president of a learned society on re-
ligion was able to proclaim that “the human body probably seems like the
most unlikely imaginable theme for a presidential address to this society.”33
The most recent few decades, however, have made the topic perhaps one
of the more likely topics for such occasions.34 Major figures adopted by the
guild of religious studies scholars in addition to Mary Douglas, such as
Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault emphasized the body
in creative and complex ways, forming bridges for body theorizing into
many disciplines.35 The renewed interest in ritual gave prominence to the
31. Douglas’s major explorations of the body as social symbol began in her Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, with a new preface by the author
(New York: Routledge, 2002; originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 117–
40 for the “two bodies,” and continued in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, with
a new introduction (London: Routledge, 1996; originally published by Barrie & Rockliff,
1970), esp. 69–87.
32. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 69.
33. Meredith B. McGuire, “Religion and the Body: Rematerializing the Human Body in the
Social Scientific Study of Religion,” JSSR 29.3 (1990): 283.
34. See the review of figures and literature through around 1990 in Catherine Bell, Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 94–117. Important studies
on the body over the past two decades are too voluminous to cite here in a meaningful
way; examples of recent and readable entryways into the topic from a variety of disciplinary
lenses might include Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, 3rd ed. (London: SAGE,
2012); Avril Horner and Angela Keane (eds.), Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000); Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the
Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Sarah
Coakley (ed.), Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [paper-
back]); David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris (eds.), Religion and the Body: Modern Science and
the Construction of Religious Meaning (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Barbara Baert (ed.), Fluid Flesh: The
Body, Religion and the Visual Arts (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2009).
35. Bourdieu, Outline, esp. 72–96; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995; originally published in 1975
21
body, canonized in Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992)

and a host of ongoing studies in the field,36 and addressed the centrality
of the body not for just reflecting one’s ethereal “beliefs” about gods or re-
ality but rather as bodily activity shaping and creating and redefining that
reality. Bodies tell stories and create realities, and then encode the values
visually; not merely a functional tool or a vacant display, bodies function
as both tool and display.
How and for what purpose, exactly, has the body been adopted as a
category for studying religion and text, both ancient and modern? Though
there is no way to give an adequate review of the variety of approaches here,
a few broad contours may be sketched out.37 Most of all, the focus on the
body became a visceral way to emphasize the “situatedness” of all projects.
Bodies are located somewhere, and we are taught how to move and display
our bodies for specific ends in particular situations. Charles Darwin had
argued that bodily movements and facial expressions were genetic, not
learned, but subsequent anthropological research demonstrated that they
were in fact learned—and thus cultural and social and ideological in every
by Editions Gallimard). For analysis of Bourdieu in this respect, see Bell, Ritual Theory,
78–80; lisahunter, Wayne Smith, and elke emerald (eds.), Pierre Bourdieu and Physical
Culture (London: Routledge, 2014); on Butler, see Christopher Peterson, “The Return of
the Body: Judith Butler’s Dialectical Corporealism,” Discourse 28.2–3 (2006): 153–77; María
Celeste Bianciotti, “Cuerpo y género: apuntes para pensar prácticas eróticas de mujeres
jóvenes. Aportes de Judith Butler y Pierre Bourdieu,” Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios
sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad 6.3 (2011): 70–82; on Foucault, see Mark D. Jordan,
Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2014); Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Laura Hengehold, The Body Problematic: Political
Imagination in Kant and Foucault (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2007). Ladelle McWhorter’s short essay, “My Body, My Self: Foucault and Ecofeminism,”
Philosophy Today 49 (2005): 110–15, clearly lays out (with specific reference to Foucault) many
of the key lines of critique against the Cartesian dualism I mentioned earlier.
36. See also Bell’s introduction to ritual, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997); for other studies on ritual and body, see, e.g., several essays in Coakley
(ed.), Religion and the Body; Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and
Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), esp. 1–42, for
adoption of body theorizing for his material; for ancient Israel, see various references in
Ithamar Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2003), though
Gruenwald does not offer any particular ritual theory of the body as such.
37. Bell, Ritual Theory, 94, has a partly overlapping list of reasons: “the rich tradition of an-
thropological studies of the body; the critique of traditional objectivisim and its ‘mentalist’
or ‘mind-centered’ notions of knowledge; and the impact of feminist and gender studies,
which, in some circles, have inspired a new ‘erotics’ of interpretive practice.”
13
way.38 This insight overlaps with the postmodern project of dismantling

“natural” dualisms of all kinds in gender studies (female/male), ecological
hermeneutics (nature/culture), sexuality (heterosexual/non-heterosexual),
sociology (individual/society), and so on, further emphasizing the malle-
able and non-eternal boundaries of the body. Moreover, the rise of ritual
studies confronted a long history in at least Western Christendom of more
ethereal philosophizing and theologizing in terms of souls and doctrines
and ideas.
Interest in the body does not have to participate in a pseudo-relativist
or postmodern cultural project, however.39 Attention to the body simply
pays close attention to what is obvious and open all around us, to our most
primal ways of signifying who we are and what we want, and attention to
the body follows texts—both ancient and modern—that insist on making
the bodies of their characters a significant part of their plots and character-
izations. And it is, to be clear, textual descriptions of bodies that must be our
focus when we study ancient literature, and for the vast majority of cases
we have very little evidence outside of the text (e.g., archaeology, visual art)
to temper our reading of the text.40 For contemporary texts, observation
and action in the real, contemporary world illustrates and incarnates the
reading; for anything chronologically before that, we are largely left to our
own imaginations and the imaginations of our narrators. For this reason,
at least for those of us committed to historical and contextual readings as
an important site of meaning, any perspective we can get on the text that
takes us back into the world of its composition and early reception should
enrich our understanding of the bodies we find there.
Embodied Biblical Studies

Is there something distinctly “biblical” about the focus on the body? For
Christian theology, at least, the body should be at the center of any dis-
cussion about God, because it is in the body of Jesus that God would be
38. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, with contributions
by Paul Ekman, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; originally published in 1872
by John Murray); see discussion in Bell, Ritual Theory, 94.
39. For a critique of which see Eagleton, Illusions,  69–75.
40. See, however, Chapter 4 in this book, which examines iconographic and archaeological
evidence for heroic bodies.
41
incarnated (this is not clearly a biblical idea, except in the gospel of John).41
In the Hebrew Bible, the opening primeval narratives in Genesis serve as
an instructive case. God creates through speech, which, though bodily, is a
fairly ethereal process (compared to, say, the Enuma Elish, where human-
bodies are created through crushed god-bodies). Everything created in
Genesis, though, is material—God never explicitly creates “minds” or
“ideas,” only celestial bodies, the dome (raqia), waters, creeping animals
and swarming sea creatures and flying birds (all adjectively characterized
by their bodily movements),42 and finally human beings:
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image (tselem), ac-
cording to our likeness (demut) . . .” So God created humans in his
image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he
created them. (Gen 1:26–27)
The enormous amount of philosophical or theological attention paid to

the “image of God” has too often overlooked the most basic and enduring
feature of this “image,” namely, that it is a physical, bodily image.43 Recent
41. E.g., recently, Ola Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in
Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016). Distinctly (non-Christian) Jewish
notions of divine incarnation also exist; see Esther J. Hamori, “Divine Embodiment in the
Hebrew Bible and Some Implications for Jewish and Christian Incarnational Theologies,”
in Bodies, Embodiment, and Theology of the Hebrew Bible, ed. S. Tamar Kamionkowski and
Wonil Kim (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 161–83, esp. 171–77, and, for a more popular (and
controversial) treatment, Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ
(New York: New Press, 2012). For Judaism, see Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “The Problem of
the Body for the People of the Book,” in Biblical Limits: Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity
and the Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David Gunn (London: Routledge, 2002), 34–55.
42. Note, e.g., the repeated use of the verb remesh in Genesis 1 to characterize all animals—
they are “creeping things.”
43. For comments on this problem focusing on the body, including the aversion to
interpreting God’s image as physical in Genesis 1, see Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine
Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge, 1996), 83–85. Catherine L. McDowell reviews
the corporeal interpretation of Genesis 1:26–27 in her The “Image of God” in the Garden of
Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5–3:24 in Light of the mīs pî pīt pî and wpt-r
Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 127–28.
Gerhard Von Rad considered the physical, bodily image “the original notion” of this text, one
that never gave way to a “spiritualizing and intellectualizing tendency”; see his Genesis: A
Commentary, rev. ed., trans. J. Marks (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1973; origi-
nally published in 1972 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 58. James Barr also declared the “ref-
erential” meaning of likeness and image language in Genesis 1 as referring to humanity’s
intellectual or spiritual qualities to be founded on a wrong understanding of the author’s
purpose, though he eschewed a purely physical interpretation at the same time; “The Image
of God in the Book of Genesis—A Study of Terminology,” BJRL 51.1 (1968): 11–26.
15
work comparing the “image” language of Genesis 1 with ancient Near

Eastern conceptions of the divine image highlights this dynamic, at least
insofar as Mesopotamian and Egyptian divine images embodied deities in
corporeal fashion.44 Moreover, the neo-Assyrian royal practice of erecting
a tsalmu (“image”) to mark conquered territory may also signal something
of the corporeal image that a deity or king could create to mark his pres-
ence on earth or as a proxy in some foreign land.45
In Genesis 2, commonly attributed to the J (Yahwist) source with his
earthy proclivities and anthropomorphic deity, God sculpts (yatsar) the
human from the dust of the earth, perhaps much like a potter creates
pots (compare with Jer 18:11; Hab 2:18), and then breathes the breath of
life into his very nose (Gen 2:7).46 God plants a garden (2:8), presumably
like a gardener would plant any garden but with divine skill, and God
speaks to the man with presumably human speech, heard with human
ears and comprehended with a human brain (Gen 2:16–17). In Genesis 3,
God walks in the Garden, where the humans hear him walking and later
speaking and then hide, prompting God to call out “Where are you?” (Gen
3:9). If, as McDowell contends, Genesis 2–3 extends the idea that humans
are in the “image” of God (but without using the precise terminology of
“image”), and we see further divine anthropomorphism there (which we
certainly do), then it stands to reason that the entire creation-garden nar-
rative of Genesis 1–3 offers a relatively coherent picture of God’s “image”
(a humanoid body) and humans with bodies in that image.47 Physicality
and spatiality everywhere mark the deity’s existence in these chapters, and
these qualities persist throughout Genesis and beyond.
In an effort toward typologizing God’s bodies in the Hebrew Bible,
Mark Smith assigns God three “bodies,” the first of which (and most im-
portant for our present discussion) is a basically human body, physical
44. E.g., McDowell, Image of God, whose interpretation of the comparative evidence leads
her to see the divine-human relationship primarily in terms of kinship; Brent A. Strawn,
“Comparative Approaches: History, Theory, and the Image of God,” in Method Matters: Essays
on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Petersen, ed. Joel M. LeMon and
Kent H. Richards (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 117–42, esp. 129–35.
45. Strawn, “Comparative Approaches,” 131–32.
46. Theodore Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 30–82, esp. 64.
47. McDowell, Image of God, esp. 117–78. This observation would not preclude any other
senses of the divine image, such as royalty or kinship or other psychological/spiritual
qualities.
61
and present on earth.48 As Smith points out, however, and in contrast to

my earlier suggestion about God’s body in Genesis 2–3, acts of talking,
walking, breathing, and so on do not strictly require a “body.” Nevertheless,
they usually do. Notwithstanding the fact that deities can presumably do
almost anything in abnormal ways, the human features of God’s bodily
appearance persist throughout Genesis—particularly in chapter 18, where
Abraham dines with three “men” (anashim), one or all of whom turn out
to be God, and in c hapter 32, where Jacob wrestles with a “man” (ish) to
whom Jacob ascribes the title “God” (elohim).49 Even in Exodus 24, where
the deity appears as a “superhuman” or “liturgical” divine body, to use
Smith’s terms,50 God has presumably humanoid “feet,” the bottoms of
which a small group beholds partway up the mountain.
Turning back to human bodies: Genesis 3 notably fixates upon the
naked and then clothed bodies of Adam and Eve. Adam’s bodily con-
nection to the earth—adam the man is made from adamah the earth—
forms both a linguistic and thematic connection in Genesis 3–4, as Adam
must till the earth with great toil after his misadventure with the Tree of
Knowledge and Cain, tiller of the adamah, brings fruit of the adamah as
an offering to God which is rejected. Cain then receives a bodily “mark,”
some mysterious visible feature that will signal divine protection in the
face of his recently committed murder (Genesis 4). The primal human an-
cestors in Genesis 1–11 all have very old bodies, their individual lives mostly
all spanning nearly a millennium, leaving us to imagine whether they ap-
pear extremely wrinkled or preternaturally youthful throughout it all since
the text offers no other physical descriptions.
All of these bodies come in only the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
I do not want to provide a skewed emphasis only on Genesis for dis-
cerning the Hebrew Bible’s overall attitude toward the body, but, given
48. Mark S. Smith, “The Three Bodies of God in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 134.3 (2015): 471–88,
and now Smith’s Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical
World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 13–30.
49. Smith, “Three Bodies,” 474–77. The major study of these particular and rare texts,
in which God is directly called a “man,” is Esther J. Hamori, “When Gods Were Men”: The
Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), esp. 1–25, 65–
103, but cf. Anne K. Knafl, Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 109–25, who critiques Hamori and Benjamin D. Sommer,
The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 40–42, 53, 132–33, for overemphasizing the uniqueness of Genesis 18 and 32 vis-à-vis
other theophanies of the divine body.
50. Smith, “Three Bodies,” 478–80.
17
its place at the front of the canon, and given the fixation on bodies and
their consequences in Israel’s story at such an early stage in the received
canonical order, I do want to suggest that a focus on the body as a primary
site of meaning is natural to this literature and overtly suggested by the
biblical authors themselves. As I hope to show in this study, at least for
the bodies of heroic figures in a variety of settings, bodies play a decisive
role throughout the Hebrew Bible—patriarchal corpses traverse national
boundaries to indicate legitimacy and covenant in the land; the height
and hair and beauty and bones of kings determine the fate of the nation;
reckless military leaders sever body parts, drive home left-handed dag-
gers, and grow their hair long to preserve strength; prophets splay their
bodies, mouth-to-mouth, on other bodies to revive the dead and contort
their bodies on the ground to enact the drama of Israel’s demise. Beyond
this, priestly bodies enact and receive rituals. Sexualized bodies—breasts,
vaginas, mouths, penises—seduce Israel to sin (e.g., Ezekiel 16 and 23) or
characterize the ideal lover in the throes of bliss (Songs).
Indeed, we might ask: Is there a coherent or even remotely comparable
corpus of texts in the ancient world that focuses on the human body as much
as the Bible?
Body Trajectories in Recent Hebrew Bible Research

The field of biblical studies has indeed adopted the theoretical rubric of
the body—faster than some disciplines, slower than others—and what has
now become a relatively steady stream of monographs and essays over the
past twenty-five years has drawn the Bible into the orbit of corporeality.51
51. For books: Géza G. Xeravits (ed.), Religion and Female Body in Ancient Judaism and Its
Environments (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015); Joan E. Taylor (ed.), The Body in Biblical, Christian
and Jewish Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); S. Tamar Kamionkowski and Wonil Kim (eds.),
Bodies, Embodiment, and Theology of the Hebrew Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2010); Jennifer
L. Koosed, (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book (London: T & T Clark,
2006); Hamilton, The Body Royal; Jon L. Berquist, Controlling Corporeality: The Body and
the Household in Ancient Israel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Alice A.
Keefe, Woman’s Body and the Social Body in Hosea 1–2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001);
Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, Body Symbolism in the Bible, trans. Linda M. Maloney
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001; originally published in 1998 by Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft).
Essays include, e.g., Danna Nolan Fewell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), “Part III The Bible and Bodies,” 389– 480;
Adriane Leveen, “Returning the Body to Its Place: Ezekiel’s Tour of the Temple,” HTR
81
In one of the earlier major contributions to the topic, Jon Berquist pro-
claims that the Hebrew Bible “obsesses about bodies,” yet at the time his
study appeared (2002), “the body in ancient Israel [was] rarely studied and
barely understood.”52 Since that time, however, many new works have ap-
peared to fill this gap. In two particular areas, specifically gender studies
(feminism and masculinity studies) and disability studies, the body takes
center stage. For example, the feminist focus on embodiment made the fe-
male bodies in Hosea an apt topic for Alice Keefe’s study, in which she ar-
gued that an over-focus on the individual female as “adulteress” in Hosea
obscured the role of the social body and the economic situation in the
eighth century bce. Locating various symbolic levels of the body allows
Keefe to connect the text with “the material and corporeal bases of human
existence” and identify the broader cultural and familial metaphors at
play—over and against the adultery of a single woman, fantasies of sex
cults, and so forth.53 Summarizing efforts to understand the divine body
in the Bible, Kamionkowski notices several recent trends, such as a rising
complexity in the terminology of anthropomorphism, recognition of dif-
ference in divine-body descriptions across texts, and an overall increase
in studies devoted to the topic of understanding the divine body as truly a
body.54 Though earlier studies of the human body in the Bible had largely
focused on questions of purity and gender, Kamionkowski points to newer
work that engages with ideologies of all kinds including power, biology,
theology, emotions, and disability.55
Indeed, the field of disability studies in particular has been the out-
standing area for exploration in biblical studies related to the body.56
105.4 (2012): 385–401, and many of the essays in Beal and Gunn, Biblical Limits, esp.
Eilberg-Schwartz, “Problem of the Body” and Mark K. George, “Assuming the Body of
the Heir Apparent: David’s Lament,” 164–74. Some have used the “body” rubric in a sig-
nificant way without engaging the history of body theorizing in any explicit manner, such
as, recently, Sandra Jacobs, The Body as Property: Physical Disfigurement in Biblical Law
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), but see further elaborations in Jacobs’s essay, “The Body
Inscribed? A Priestly Initiative,” in The Body in Biblical, Christian and Jewish Texts, ed. Joan E.
Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1–16.
52. Berquist, Controlling Corporeality, 1.
53. Keefe, Woman’s Body,  12–13.
54. S. Tamar Kamionkowski, “Introduction,” in Bodies, Embodiment, and Theology of the
Hebrew Bible, ed. S. Tamar Kamionkowski and Wonil Kim (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 3.
55. Kamionkowski, “Introduction,” 6–9.
56. Significant recent studies include Sarah J. Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, and Amos
Yong (eds.), The Bible and Disability: A Commentary (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
91
Though disability theorists articulate their methods in a range of ways,

most focus on the social context of the body:57 like the body itself, concepts
of disability are not entirely natural; they are also constructed, and as such
they are loaded sites of meaning.58 When working with a literary text, dis-
ability theorists may ask questions such as these: What concepts of ability
and disability has the author constructed in this text? How does the body
and its disabilities in this text intersect with notions of gender, power, and
race? What kinds of bodies are acceptable or valued or devalued in this
context, and why? The field trends toward activism and reflects on con-
temporary politics, economics, and legal codes. For ancient texts (like the
Bible), disability readings often hew to classic literary and historical ques-
tions, but the full gamut of ideological critiques and cultural deconstruc-
tions also abounds.
For example, reflecting on the problem of scant bodily description in the
Hebrew Bible, Jeremy Schipper notices that typical readers imagine bodies
not explicitly described as “disabled” to be “abled” bodies—that is, normal
bodies. However, the Bible’s “normal” body (by volume of description)
2017); Candida Moss and Jeremy Schipper (eds.), Disability Studies and Biblical Literature
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Jeremy Schipper, Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora: Representations of
Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2008); Saul M. Olyan, Disability
in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper (eds.), This
Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2007); Jeremy Schipper, Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in
the David Story (London: T&T Clark, 2006). My own introduction to this stream of liter-
ature was Rebecca Raphael’s “Things Too Wonderful: A Disabled Reading of Job,” PRS 31
(2004): 399–424. For an example of New Testament scholarship in this vein, see Louise
J. Lawrence, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory- Disabled Characters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); for theology, e.g., Deborah Beth Creamer, Disability
and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
57. In other words, since what counts as “disabled” can vary widely, what one group marks as
a “disability” tells us a lot about their values. This is not to ignore the fact that the “medical
model” of disability, which focuses on the physical properties of healing or managing the
real problems disability creates, has a focus very different from the “social model,” which
separates “impairment” (physical issues that prevent a certain level of bodily performance)
from “disability” (a socially constructed set of values and even discrimination against im-
paired people). On this, see Schipper, Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant,  15–18.
58. For interdisciplinary approaches to disability studies concepts, see Rachel Adams,
Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (eds.), Keywords for Disability (New York: New York
University Press, 2015); Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed.
(London: Routledge, 2013); Dan Goodley, Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction
(London: SAGE, 2010).
02
could very well be considered as impaired by any number of illnesses

and physical problems.59 Thus, Schipper argues that “like disability, ‘able-
bodied’ is a marker of bodily difference and not the default normal state
of human existence from which disability deviates.”60 As Rebecca Raphael
puts it, we “cannot begin to define disability without reference to some-
thing else, and that something else also requires definition.”61
One may thus pit bodies against each other in any number of ways and
for any number of reasons; a structuralist or perhaps poststructuralist flair
permeates these discussions, as interpreters build up and/or deny meaning
based on pairs of strong opposites, such as “disabled”/“abled,” “strong”/
“weak,” and so on. In her Biblical Corpora, Raphael, for example, focuses on
the priestly body (particularly in Leviticus) and its power for representing
God through various concepts of bodily perfection.62 To be sure, the priestly
focus on blemishes, discharges, and so on that would make one bodily (and
thus spiritually? morally?) unfit for tabernacle/temple service makes the
priestly body obvious and meaningful for definition of the “disabled” on bib-
lical terms. Without other visual iconography in the sacred space, the priest’s
body is the visual point of focus.63
The field of “masculinity studies” represents one of the more recent
trajectories in biblical studies focusing on the way bodies are constructed
in the text.64 In his recent book Making Men (2015), Stephen Wilson traces
59. In perhaps the most influential of the recent pioneering works on disability studies,
Lennard J. Davis points out that words like “normal,” “normalcy,” and “average” appear only
relatively recently in European languages (e.g., the current definition of “normal” appears in
English around 1840; Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body [London: Verso,
1995], 24).
60. Schipper, Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, 19.
61. Raphael, Biblical Corpora, 11.
62. Raphael, Biblical Corpora,  31–39.
63. Raphael, Biblical Corpora, 39.
64. For a recent review of developments in this field, see Eric Thurman, “Adam and the
Making of Masculinity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative, ed. Danna Nolan
Fewell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 411–21. Some of the pioneer studies in this
field for biblical studies are Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems
for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) and David J. A. Clines, “David the
Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible,” in Clines, Interested Parties: The
Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press,
1995), 212–43. Several major edited volumes and monographs have appeared in the past
two decades, e.g., Ovidiu Creangă (ed.), Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond
(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010); Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit (eds.),
Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014); Stephen
21
the history of masculinity studies beginning with Freud’s contention that

both female and male traits inhere within everyone, with gender identity
as male or female encouraged or suppressed at childhood (and onward),
on through the rise of “sex-role theory” in the twentieth century, which
asserted masculinity and femininity to be “roles” played out on a “social
stage” toward a well-oriented society, and then finally to the more contem-
porary critiques of sex-role theory as perpetuating inequalities and failing
to recognize gender along a spectrum (without exactly clear roles).65 In its
most basic formulation today, the study of masculinities analyzes the way
men’s identities and bodies are constructed and reflected in texts, both
ancient and modern, and emphasizes variety, difference, and themes of
power, dominance, and violence often associated with males. This field has
obvious implications for the topic of this study, since many of the Bible’s
“heroic bodies” are male and function as rubrics—of emulation, disasso-
ciation, or other forms of subtle comparison—for other male characters.
These trajectories of disability and gender raise many questions: Is the
“heroic body” a potential or productive opposite of the “disabled body”?
Are both male and female bodies equally “heroic” on biblical terms, or
is “heroism” a function of primarily male identity in these texts? Was the
“heroic body” a native concept in ancient literature, and specifically in the
Hebrew Bible? Is there a “hero-normative” body? Much of this depends,
as is so often the case, on definitions and the point one wants to make.
The Hebrew Bible offers nothing like a sustained focus on the heroic body
on its own terms or vis-à-vis other kinds of bodies in general—though it
does offer a focus on heroic bodies vis-à-vis other specific bodies in nar-
rative contexts and for specific reasons. In the present study, I would like
to attempt positing the “heroic body” as a certain kind of body within the
biblical corpus; at the very least, it is a body that belongs to a “hero” (spe-
cifically in warrior, royal/leaderly, and “founder” capacities, or especially
where these categories overlap; more on this in a moment) and also a body
that is described, manipulated, or used in some remarkable way. These
heroic bodies are not exactly binary opposites to “disabled” bodies in the
M. Wilson, Making Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015); Rhiannon Graybill, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the
Hebrew Prophets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ilona Zsolnay (ed.), Being a
Man: Negotiating Ancient Constructs of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2017). Note also the
chapter titled “Israel’s Ideal Man” by Jonathan Kaplan in My Perfect One: Typology and Early
Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–53.
65. Wilson, Making Men,  5–8.
2
Hebrew Bible, though insofar as heroes of the type I am describing are
triumphant over others, the narratives in which they appear may very well
posit something congruous to the abled-disabled dynamic that disability
theorists have found at play in the political theology of any number of bib-
lical texts. Sometimes, these categories, if pursued simplistically, become
confused—one case in point being Jacob in Genesis 32 (see Chapter 2 of
this book).
I review these trajectories—highlighting gender and disability—not
because I have the ability to provide a sophisticated gender or disability
analysis of every key text in this study, but because these approaches deal
so explicitly with the body, and they represent profound avenues by which
interpreters have begun to consider the body as significant. My own ap-
proach represents more of a literary and ancient sociohistorical analysis,
fascinated by the problem of why bodies were described by these authors
specifically at the points where they are described, and how those bodies
evoke and provoke other bodies in the literature. My hope, having now
considered disability and gender analyses broadly, is that these theoretical
approaches could become better integrated with historical-critical and lit-
erary readings, and I will attempt to model what that might look like, even
if in small ways.
Following some cues from Mark Hamilton’s study, The Body Royal: The
Social Poetics of Kingship in Ancient Israel (2005), I focus on the drama of
Israel’s politics, religion, and social-symbolic world that plays itself out on
significant bodies, of kings, warriors, and founding figures, as well as the
bodies against which these kings, warriors, and founding figures claim
significance. Like Hamilton, we will find it necessary to examine a broad
range of materials, cutting across any particular book, corpus (such as the
“Deuteronomistic History”), time period, or region. In doing so, we will
find that biblical authors reflect on the heroic body in a variety of ways
and that comparanda from Greece and the Bible’s broader ancient Near
Eastern environment sharpen our focus on the Bible’s local adaptation of
broadly shared heroic-bodily concerns across the ancient Mediterranean
world.66
66. Hamilton, Body Royal,  2–3.

23
Define the Hero
The term “hero” is somewhat unstable in discourse about both contempo-
rary and ancient worlds, and thus far I have been using it without a clear
definition. Like “love,” “glory,” or “wisdom,” “hero” can take on entirely
different trajectories and nuances dependent on the angle of viewing, the
circumstance of the communicator, a sudden polemical intent, a rhetor-
ical flourish, and so on. Moreover, the bodies we might describe as “he-
roic” under a specific definition could also more simply be considered
“extraordinary,” a term that might encompass any number of bodies not
considered under simplistic binaries such as abled/disabled, heroic/unhe-
roic, and so on.67
Although this definition will hopefully sharpen in chapters to come,
a few preliminary words are in order to justify the choices made here for
our case studies.68 Rather than considering the “hero” very broadly and
functionally as “any prominent actor in a narrative,” I want to focus on
characters who function at the intersection of three categories: (1) warriors
in battle; (2) kings and other notable leaders; (3) founding figures. Some of the
most important case studies in light of our body theme, such as Saul and
David, occupy space in all three of these categories simultaneously and
their bodies play telling, specific roles in defining their heroic identity. In
fact, following the Hebrew Bible’s lead in this regard, Saul and David are
the “model heroes” for this investigation of the heroic body, with the def-
initions reverse-engineered to fit their narratives. One may come to any
number of other ways to define the heroic or delimit one’s attention to
the body in the biblical corpus, but the Saul-David exemplar has the ad-
vantage of imposing a grid that is native to and prompted by the text we
are examining—thus helping to guard against blatant anachronism and
haphazard associations in what I hope to be a study guided by the basic
principles of the historical-critical method, in addition to literary and other
cultural theories involving the body.
67. For this terminology of the “extraordinary” body, see Schipper, “Body; II. Hebrew Bible/
Old Testament,” 269. For a consideration of the “hero” on broad terms as a focal point of
cultural attention, see Ari Kohen, Untangling Heroism: Classical Philosophy and the Concept
of the Hero (London: Routledge, 2014), esp. 1–4 for fascinating comments on heroism as a
particularly American obsession.
68. For comments and bibliography on the question of “heroic” definition, especially in
conjunction with the category of “epic,” see Brian R. Doak, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest
and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Boston: Ilex Foundation and the Center for
Hellenic Studies, 2012), 37–44.
42
Perhaps most central to the heroic definition across cultures, both an-
cient and modern, however, is the category of the warrior. Heroes fight
and die, and their bodies are obviously central in a literal, physical sense.
Moreover, though contemporary audiences redefine categories of the he-
roic for their own times, heroes are often thought to live in a “heroic age,”
during which great battles of the past occur and against which contem-
porary action may be measured.69 The figures in the heroic age attract
and define other heroes as well, figures who associate with or oppose
each other. The books of Judges and Samuel, particularly, in the Hebrew
Bible create and enshrine the memories of the early heroic period, and
it is here that we find the formative warrior conflict that places ancient
Israel most squarely within the conversation of ancient heroic poetry.70
Warriors typically have leaders; before Israel’s monarchy, the Bible pre-
sents these leaders (called “judge/judges,” shophet/shophetim) as some-
thing like short-term, nationalist guerrilla fighters, and later, after Saul, as
“king/kings” (melek/melakim). Speaking of the category of the king along-
side other types of leaders more generically is fraught with problems for
biblical scholars, since the Hebrew Bible itself makes quite a stir about
the question of formal kingship vis-à-vis other roles (see, for example,
Deuteronomy 17–18; Judges; 1 Samuel 8), but in their function as warriors
and leaders of warriors, kings fall together with other, less formal rulers.
The inclusion of “founding figures” under my definition of the heroic
is somewhat harder to defend. I discuss it further in Chapter 2 devoted to
Jacob, but for now, let me say that the patriarchs—particularly Abraham,
Jacob, and Joseph—do embody something of the interplay between “royal”
and “warrior” roles (certainly less so on the “warrior” front, though it is
not entirely absent), and the placement or movement of their bodies (for
Jacob and Joseph) marks a loaded moment of national identity during the
settlement of the land. They are something like “uber-heroes” who em-
body everything for Israel. Moses—whom I do not treat in detail in this
69. See, e.g., the classic studies of H. Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1974; reprint of 1912 edition); Cecil M. Bowra’s Heroic Poetry
(London: Macmillan, 1952) and The Meaning of a Heroic Age (London: King’s College, 1957),
as well as the review and updated discussion for Israelite poetry by Charles L. Echols, “Tell
Me, O Muse”: The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) in the Light of Heroic Poetry (London: T & T Clark,
2008), 135–64.
70. On this, see Mark S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and
Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2014), and
many sources cited there.
25
study—also falls into this category, probably even more clearly as he is the
first “national” leader and does act in clearer warrior capacities.
Prophets could also be considered “heroes” in the sense that they are
leading actors in the drama, and their own actions are not always separate
from warrior activities—here I am thinking particularly of Samuel’s and
Elijah’s acts of sword-hacking enemies (in 1 Sam 15:33 and 1 Kgs 18:40, re-
spectively). In terms of the heroic body, prophets act in a variety of roles that
are incredibly fascinating on a number of levels and worthy of more attention
than they have received in terms of the body.71 Nevertheless, because of the
strict identification I have set out between heroes and warriors, they are not
included here except in passing references where relevant.
Finally, we must admit that in many cases we have characters who
could be sites of heroic-bodily reflection, but their bodies are simply not de-
scribed in any detailed manner. Deborah, for example, would fit two of the
three heroic qualities listed here—being an early and powerful judge in
the book of Judges and leading Israel into battle—but we learn nothing
notable about her body in that role (except that she is a woman, and in that
sense her otherwise undescribed body is a unique one in terms of Israel’s
national leadership). Joshua is clearly a heroic warrior/leader, but for what-
ever reason the narrators of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and
Judges had no interest in highlighting any particular aspect of his body.
We do find relatively unremarkable references to Joshua’s “hand” as an
aspect of his leaderly or military agency (e.g., Josh 8:18, 26), and his feet
stand on holy ground (Josh 5:15) or he commands the feet of others to
stand on the necks of enemies (Josh 10:24). Routine references that are
common for nearly all biblical characters of this nature are not the spe-
cific bodily cues that prompt the reflections in this study, which home in
on examples where some aspect of the heroic body plays a meaningful,
intentional role in the narrative. Admittedly, however, the selection of
heroic bodies for consideration is ultimately a matter of judgment. The
heroic-bodily moments I seize on in this study spark what Mark Hamilton
71. But see William Doan and Terry Giles, Prophets, Performance, and Power: Performance
Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2005); Rhiannon Graybill, Are We Not
Men, and “Voluptuous, Tortured, and Unmanned: Ezekiel with Daniel Paul Schreber,” in
The Bible and Posthumanism, ed. Jennifer L. Koosed (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2014), 137–56.
62
(following George Hunston Williams) calls a “luminous particularity,” that

is, “a telling detail that illuminates the whole.”72
An Orientation to Comparative Moves
At various points in this study—certainly more prominent in some places
than others (e.g., Chapters 4 and 6), and sometimes relegated to footnotes
in place of what could be a more robust interaction in the body of the
text—I make comparisons with both Greek and ancient Near Eastern ma-
terials outside the Bible, specifically those related to the bodily image of the
hero. Though such a practice will seem quite normal to those who study
the Bible “in its ancient context,” I am committed to raising the problem
of the justification for comparison. To be sure, even the word “context,”
which for some has a natural meaning with no need for explanation at all
(i.e., as the historical context of authorship), is not self-evident;73 one may
speak of historical contexts, literary contexts, contexts within communities
of reception, theological contexts, and contexts of identity for the reader at
numerous levels (e.g., politics, gender, race, sexuality, religion). Not one of
these contexts is obvious, clear, or natural for all projects.
Those of us who treasure comparative arguments may rightly feel un-
comfortable if, in the end, our justification for the choice of comparative
materials is merely that we see similarities between one thing and another
thing, or that we happen to be familiar with the comparanda by accident
of our training or reading, or even that the comparanda we use happen
to have been produced in a vaguely similar geographical world or within
some broadly shared chronological horizon.74 What, then, are the ideal
grounds for comparison?
In a sense, the value of a given comparative move rises or falls on the
success of the comparison for the rhetorical and analytical purposes of
the researcher. There is no particular comparison that is strictly “natural,”
and none are strictly forbidden. Reflecting upon his influential essay “In
72. Hamilton, Body Royal, 9.

73. On this problem, see Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical
Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox,
1993), esp. 106–26.
74. I have treated this subject, as well as the specific comparison between the ancient Near
Eastern and Aegean world, in Doak, Last of the Rephaim, esp. 25–50; the present discussion
is a truncated and sharpened version of that treatment.
2
7
Comparison a Magic Dwells,” J. Z. Smith argued for an emphasis on

choice, and he reaffirms the commitment to viewing comparison’s pur-
pose for dealing with malleable “aspects and relations,” not “things,” and
for emphasizing difference as well as sameness in the comparative act.75
Toward this end, Smith has influentially argued that comparison should
be a “polythetic” enterprise (as opposed to “monothetic”), seeking not
“the idea of perfect, unique, single differentia” but rather a flexible set of
differences and similarities among compared materials.76 Even so, I am
very happy to agree with Brent Strawn’s argument that comparison, on
the grandest level, is not, in fact, “optional” but rather a neurologically re-
quired activity: “comparison seems to be the default disposition, perhaps
the most foundational of all methods.”77 The bedeviled details of how this
act of comparison plays out must emerge in each case, even if the overall
comparative act is natural, but we should organize our efforts in this re-
gard so that comparisons remain flexible, open, and self-conscious.
Having essentially admitted that there is no specific thing that demands
to be compared with any other thing, it is certainly true that scholars in
biblical studies have typically delimited their choice of comparisons by
considering the question of historically bounded influence. Did a particular
episode, character, or literary motif derive from some other group or reli-
gion? The stakes are always implicitly theological, even if in ghost-form,
and have often been explicitly apologetic. Whatever spiritual obsession
one may have with discovering the true uniqueness of the biblical mes-
sage for contemporary purposes, the question is in fact raised by the liter-
ature itself78—ancient Israel genuinely claimed for itself a special status, a
set-apartness that makes the issue of its comparability with its broader an-
cient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world a loaded historical problem
75. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification,” in A

Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. Kimberly C. Patton and
Benjamin C. Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 238–39. The earlier essay
is Jonathan Z. Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” in Smith, Imagining Religion: From
Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 19–35.
76. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism,” in Smith,
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 4–5.
77. Strawn, “Comparative Approaches,” 117–18.
78. The classic essay on this topic is Peter Machinist, “The Question of Distinctiveness
in Ancient Israel,” in Essential Papers on Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Frederick E.
Greenspahn (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 420–42; originally published in I.
Eph’al and M. Cogan (eds.), A Highway from Egypt to Assyria: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern
History and Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990).
82
as well as a continually alluring case study in the way religions and their
texts may evoke other religions and their texts as congeners, foils, satire,
appropriation, and polemic. Briefly put, I see the Bible’s heroic depictions
in conversation— sometimes complimentary, sometimes adversarial—
with heroic literature that blossomed in the Homeric world of the late
eighth century bce through the classical period. This move does not ignore
the eastern Mesopotamian contexts, nor the Egyptian for that matter, but
rather seeks to include the Aegean world in the conversation. This dual
focus, then, to the East and to the West, frames my comparative turn.
Looking to the West, discussions of the “hero” in the Bible cannot
help but invoke the broader Mediterranean context of heroic literature—
particularly the Aegean world of the eighth to fifth centuries bce.79 Though
classicists have, for the last few decades but especially recently, been in the
habit of acknowledging the ancient Near Eastern influence of everything
from material culture and writing scripts to myths, laws, and rituals,80 bib-
lical scholars have historically had a more difficult time assimilating in-
sights from the Mediterranean world into their own work.81 The reasons
for this vary. Some of the problem stems from the very origins of biblical
studies as an independent academic discipline. During the birth and early
flourishing of the modern university in eighteenth–nineteenth century ce
Europe, the need to re-create a modern state on the model of Greece or
Rome, combined with the continuing centrality of the Bible as an object of
intense debate in the post-Reformation period, led to the creation of a new
79. Most influential for me in this respect has been the work of Gregory Nagy, particularly
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999; first published 1979) and, in more popular format, Nagy,
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
80. Major and relatively recent examples include Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing
Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, trans. Margaret
E. Pinder and Walter Burkert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; originally
published in 1984 by Carl Winter); Christoph Auffarth, Der drohende Untergang: “Schöpfung”
in Mythos und Ritual im alten Orient und in Griechenland am Beispiel der Odyssee und des
Ezechielbuches (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991); Martin West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic
Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Carolina López-Ruiz, When the
Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010); Bruce Louden, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge
81. But see, to cite one example to the contrary, Dale Launderville, Piety and Politics: The
Dynamics of Royal Authority in Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).
92
Bible—as the subject of a classical-style academic inquiry.82 Inevitably,

the Bible would then be studied not only with the tools flourishing for
the Greek and Latin classics (e.g., philology, which at any rate had been a
long practice in biblical studies before the modern period), but also using
the terminology, assumptions, and categories of Greek and Latin studies
as they existed at the time. The sheer prestige of Greek literature in the
academy all but ensured that the academic study of the Bible would have
to “elevate” its texts to the status of Homer, Hesiod, and later classical
authors (a move prefigured broadly already in Greco-Roman antiquity).83
The Bible would thus be compared with the Homeric corpus as epic liter-
ature,84 and biblical poetry was assigned a “meter” on the basis of classical
poetry.85
Nevertheless, the comparison with Greek materials deserves more
attention, albeit for different reasons and on a different basis. Detailed
archaeological and textual studies showing exchange on the levels of ma-
terial culture and shared literature provide enough evidence to see fre-
quent and deep contact across the Mediterranean world. From the Levant,
the Phoenicians famously spread to the far western worlds of Spain and
northwest Africa, and from the Aegean world, Greeks had their own trade
82. Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford
83. E.g., Josephus in Against Apion, and for discussion of this phenomenon, Gunnar
Haaland, “Convenient Fiction or Causal Factor? The Questioning of Jewish Antiquity ac-
cording to Against Apion 1.2,” in Flavius Josephus: Interpretation and History, ed. Jack Pastor,
Pnina Stern, and Menahem Mor (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 163–176. Others such as Philo, the
author of the Letter of Aristeas, and Ezekiel the Tragedian participate in this phenomenon.
84. See the sources listed in Ken Dowden, “West on East: Martin West’s East Face of Helicon
and Its Forerunners,” JHellSt 121 (2001): 167–75, esp. 168–69, and examples such as Zachary
Bogan, Homerus,’Ebraizon sive comparatio Homeri cum scriptoribus sacris quoad normam
loquendi (Oxford: Hall, 1658) and Otto Gruppe, Die griechischen Kulte und Mythen in ihren
Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen, vol. 1: Einleitung (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1887).
Julius Wellhausen’s famous invocation of Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum
(first published in 1795; now in translation as Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans. Anthony
Grafton [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014]) in at least the title of his own
Prolegomena also comes readily to mind (Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J.
Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies [Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock]; earlier published [in its
second edition] as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 1883).
85. James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981). As Kugel points out (Idea, 233), the comparison among po-
etic traditions was not bounded only by the search for a past in ancient Greece and Rome,
but also included indigenous European traditions.
03
networks.86 Concerning our specific heroic focus in the present work, re-
cent investigations have even gone as far as to suggest that biblical heroic
depictions participated in an intertextual engagement with Homeric epic
by way of emulation or polemical contest.87 At the very least, comparison
between warrior concerns in Greek and Semitic texts has proven to be a
fruitful way to see new things in each corpus and explore what makes a
particular text uniquely meaningful in its context.
Turning to the East, comparisons with the ancient Near East abound
in Hebrew Bible studies and seem to require little justification. The ge-
ographical location and (Semitic) linguistic stream that ancient Israel
inhabited ensured some amount of basic literary, religious, and cultural
sharing, thus making the comparative move more obvious for histori-
cally minded interpreters. Even so, clear, traceable material links between
Israel and these other cognate cultures in the ancient Near East have been
notoriously hard to come by. Though at points biblical authors mimic
phraseology or extended imagery that is quite suggestive of very specific
materials in the Ugaritic corpus,88 we have as yet uncovered no cache of
Ugaritic tablets lurking in the archives of Israelite scribes. By what chan-
nels, and during what time period, did Israel interact with this literature?
For heroic materials specifically, in his Poetic Heroes Mark Smith has
recently shown many detailed possibilities for reading heroic tropes in
Ugaritic stories concerning Aqhat, Baal, and the Rephaim.89 Moreover,
the parade example of heroic presentation from ancient Mesopotamia, the
Gilgamesh Epic, enjoyed wide dissemination across the Near Eastern world,
with versions in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite; archaeologists discovered
86. E.g., Markus Witte and Stefan Alkier (eds.), Die Griechen und der Vordere Orient: Beiträge
zum Kultur-und Religionskontakt zwischen Griechenland und dem Vordere Orient im
1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2003); John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, 4th ed.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999; originally published in 1964 by Pelican Books);
Ann C. Gunter, Greek Art and the Orient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, trans. Mary
Turton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001; originally published in 1987 by
Ediciones Bellaterra).
87. Azzan Yadin, “Goliath’s Armor and Israelite Collective Memory,” VT 54.3 (2004): 373–95;
but cf. Serge Frolov and Allen Wright, “Homeric and Ancient Near Eastern Intertextuality in
1 Samuel 17,” JBL 130.3 (2011): 451–71.
88. E.g., many examples in Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other
Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), esp. 19–107.
89. Smith, Poetic Heroes, 97–208.
31
a fragment of the epic at Megiddo from a Late Bronze context (within the
borders of what would later become Israel), and clay analysis proved that
scribes produced the text in the Levant, perhaps at Gezer (i.e., it was not
imported from Mesopotamia).90 Many scholars of Greek heroic texts now
assume that the “heroic pair” model of Achilles and Patroklus derived from
Gilgamesh and Enkidu.91 Thus, in addition to Homer, various ancient Near
Eastern texts provide crucial comparative material for interpreting the he-
roic body in ancient Israel. Because far less work has been done by biblical
scholars with relation to the Greek Mediterranean world, I have weighted
my own comparative interests in that direction. Even so, more studies could
and should be directed toward considering, for example, the role of the body
in the Ugaritic corpus and the cuneiform literatures more broadly.
I assume it as axiomatic that within the historical-critical tradition
I generally adopt, comparisons between Israel and Greece or between
Israel and the broader ancient Near East should be predicated on demon-
strable shared contact through material culture, language, and/or more-
or-less-demonstrable literary influence. Though one cannot usually give a
complete justification for these shared elements in a totalizing manner for
every minute comparison or for a set of comparisons as a whole (except in
a separate project that could be devoted to just such justifications), an open
recognition of the grounds for comparison and the problems haunting the
comparative enterprise at least allows for a level of reflexivity appropriate
for the task at hand. Moreover, I understand that within the boundaries
of the historically critically justified set of materials under comparative
consideration, the extent to which any given comparison comes off as
illuminating depends on the crucial choices the interpreter makes and the
ability of the comparison to offer some new vista on the compared mater-
ials. In the end, comparison is more like magic than science. The concept
of “luminous particularity” mentioned by Hamilton applies not only to the
selection of textual episodes of the heroic body I interpret in this book, but
also to those extra-biblical texts we examine and the way they reflect on the
Bible—and the way the Bible reflects on them.
90. Albrecht Goetze and Selim J. Levy, “Fragment of the Gilgamesh Epic from Megiddo,”
Atiqot 2 (1959): 121–
28; Yuval Goren, Hans Mommsen, Israel Finkelstein, and Nadav
Na’aman, “A Provenance Study of the Gilgamesh Fragment from Megiddo,” Archaeometry
51.5 (2009): 763–73.
91. West, East Face, 334–437, and Bruno Currie, “The Iliad, Gilgamesh, and Neoanalysis,” in
Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, ed. Franco Montanari,
Antonios Rengakos, and Christos C. Tsagalis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 543–80.
23
3
 Jacob
Israel’s Heroic Body
The Body Is the Nation Is the Land

The narrator of Gen 32:25–29 presents us with the wounded, limping body
of the ancestor Jacob at the most loaded possible moment for identifying
the body of the founder with the nation of Israel. In this mysterious inci-
dent, Jacob grapples body-to-body with an unnamed being who wrenches
his hip out of socket. The patriarch limps away, renamed “Israel,” and
his offspring constitute the tribal foundation of the Bible’s central family.
Now in name as well as in the bodies of his progeny, Jacob carries forward
with him—in his body, as his body, his own self—the substance and iden-
tity of Israel the nation. Despite myriad identifications of the wrestling
opponent in the passage, from Canaanite river-demons to Esau-alter-egos
to Christological typologies,1 and despite geographical confusion about
the location of the various camps mentioned in Genesis 32,2 two narra-
tive facts remains clear: Jacob’s body changes during a close physical en-
counter, and Jacob’s clan approaches the border of the Promised Land,
ready to cross over, embodying in their movements the precious substance
of the covenant, the bodies of the children that already are and will become
Israel, the nation.
Many religious traditions, both ancient and modern, fixate on the
body of founding heroic figures and invest those bodies, through text or
1. Esther J. Hamori, “When Gods Were Men”: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern
Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 96–103.
2. E.g., Jeremy Hutton, “Jacob’s ‘Two Camps’ and Transjordanian Geography: Wrestling with
Order in Genesis 32,” ZAW 22.1 (2010): 20–32.
43
geographical and archaeological tradition, with the power to define on-

going realities. To be sure, the heroic body is never merely a relic of the
past, but, stealing a turn of phrase from the famous definition of history by
Johan Huizinga, it is a corporeal form through which a civilization renders
account to itself of its own bodies, beliefs, and desires.3 For Christianity,
Jesus openly offers his own body to followers at the Last Supper, evoking
a constellation of images related to communal banquets and the Jewish
sacrifice tradition, not to mention the crucifixion itself, a scene of bodily
torture with salvific implications. Early Christians—indeed, Christians
today—fashioned their own bodies after Jesus’s through acts of pilgrimage
and fasting (Matt 4:1– 2; Luke 4:1– 2), eating, and physical suffering
(whether as the result of actual persecution or symbolic participation in
the crucifixion). Here the absence of the founder’s body in the grave is the
proverbial exception that proves the rule, because the lack of a singular
corpse conveys the universal bodily presence of Jesus among his followers
in and as the bodies of the followers and in the communion meal. In some
strains of Islam, the body of the prophet Muhammad plays a not dissim-
ilar role, as in one tradition where the prophet offers the gift of his own
body to followers at his final pilgrimage and in various mystical strains
that focus on relics and the bodies of the saints.4
Having the right body, in the right place, at the right time creates and
sustains a nation. Indeed, as Francesca Stavrakopoulou has suggested, the
burial of significant bodies, such as Sarah and Abraham at Machpelah (in
Genesis 23 and 25, respectively), holds the power to inscribe the land itself
with values and meanings, focusing memory at a particular center and
energizing physical space on that basis.5 In his classic study “Kin, Cult,
Land and Afterlife,” Brichto spoke of “vertical” and “horizontal” dimen-
sions to the meaning of sepulcher and land—Israelites were forbidden to
sell land permanently (Lev 25:23) since, on the chronological plane, the
land belongs to the family perpetually into the past and future, and on the
3. Johan Huizinga, “A Definition of the Concept of History,” in Philosophy and History: Essays

Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row,
1963), 9.
4. E.g., Brannon Wheeler, “Gift of the Body in Islam: The Prophet Muhammad’s Camel
Sacrifice and Distribution of Hair and Nails at His Farewell Pilgrimage,” Numen 57.3/4
(2010): 341–88; Scott A. Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred
Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
5. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical
Land Claims (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 137.
35
Jacob: Israel’s Heroic Body 35
horizontal plane of the current living family’s existence, the land belongs
to the family as a whole, of which the individual takes his or her part.6
The correlation Brichto makes between tomb and land, evoking concepts
of afterlife and parental care (Exod 20:12), emphasizes that for a political
or cultural founder, the body is of enormous importance for legitimacy.
While the fate of these founding bodies includes, very significantly, the
final burial location,7 in Genesis the living, active body plays an equally im-
portant role. Both bodies, the living and the dead, are linked in a contin-
uous world of action and serve to create a tangible myth of the founding
figure in Genesis 12–50, where narrators describe the movements and
(mis)adventures of the chosen family.
The identity between the body of the patriarch and the land Israel in-
habits mirrors the dual promises of the central covenant God establishes
with the people: they will have numerous children, and they will receive
land (e.g., Gen 12:1–3; 15:5; 28:13–15). For the narrators of these stories, the
land is not a purely “spiritual place” inside one’s heart, and the bodies
are not mere symbols whose physicality can be easily discarded. The lo-
cation and status of the actual body matters. This is not to say, however,
that the ancestral body could not also speak meaningfully in a non-literal
manner for interpreters. For example, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 bce–50
ce), the famous early Jewish allegorist, developed an intricate reading of
the Torah that made Egypt the “land of the body”—a place of passion,
sense perception, and corporeality, a material entity dualistically opposed
in his Platonic system to the realm of soul, God, and so on. To leave Egypt,
then, was to flee the prison of passions.8 On a plainer reading of the text it-
self, the tedious and drawn-out narrative of Jacob’s and Joseph’s respective
bone transfers from Egypt back to the land demonstrates just how crucial
these actual bodies are to the establishment of the future nation—the land
and the bodies go together, and one loses meaning without the other.9
6. Herbert Chanan Brichto, “Kin, Cult, Land and Afterlife: A Biblical Complex,” HUCA 44
(1973): 1–54, here  8–9.
7. A topic analyzed in a detailed manner by Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers, at least for
Abraham, Moses, and other characters primarily within the Torah.
8. Sarah J. K. Pearce, The Land of the Body: Studies in Philo’s Representation of Egypt
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), esp. 81–128.
9. I forgo discussion of the patriarchal bone transfer here in favor of presenting it alongside
the transfer of Saul’s bones in Chapter 6 of this book.
63
“Israel” itself literally goes down to Egypt, a nation within another nation,
and comes back up in bodily form, both the living and the dead.
Admittedly, in the ancestral narratives of Genesis, rich descriptions of
bodies do not appear often—here and there a character may “raise his
eyes” (nasa eynaw), in the common Hebrew idiom, or the “hand” (yad)
may stretch out to accomplish some goal. These descriptions hardly
qualify for the explicit, sustained focus on the heroic body that illumin-
ates the broader drama in which the characters appear. However, several
bodily episodes do stand out as crucial for understanding the nascent he-
roic drama as it develops in what is presented as the founding period of
ancient Israel. In this chapter, I want to illustrate how Jacob’s body is the
most active, visible, and frequently represented body among the ancestors
in Genesis 12–50, and I provide analysis for understanding how and why
Jacob’s body appears and performs in the way that it does.10 Though in this
chapter I cannot provide exhaustive commentary on the ancestral episodes
in their full narrative, thematic, or source-critical capacities,11 what I do
offer is a tour through Jacob’s body as it appears in the narrative at several
critical moments, paradigmatic as I think it is for Israel’s experience as a
whole and even for some of the specific heroic-bodily themes we will ex-
plore in subsequent chapters of this book.
Before continuing, a problem of definition: Are any of the characters
in Genesis 12–50, especially Jacob for our purposes here, “heroes” under a
reasonably specific definition of heroism? In the previous chapter, I began
to define the hero under three headings: warriors, kings and notable leaders,
and founding figures. The case studies we examine in this book fall into all
three of these categories, or at least two of them strongly with a gesture
10. For consideration of the “beauty” of Sarai, Rachel, Joseph, and others, see Chapter 5 of
this book.
11. For scholarship over the past century and a half, the historical growth of the ancestral
narratives (and the Torah as a whole) has been a topic of immense speculation. Some of
this speculation has proved fruitful for considering thematic questions, such as ours in this
present study, and some of it has not. In this chapter, and indeed in this book as a whole,
I will not engage in the classic source-critical questions except where they become a direct lit-
erary problem for the material I am analyzing. For the Torah, see the multitude of positions
sketched out in Jan Christian Gertz, Bernard M. Levinson, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, and Konrad
Schmid (eds.), The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe,
Israel, and North America (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016). For more general commentary,
one of the more comprehensive to date remains Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–36, trans.
J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1995; originally published in 1981 by Neukirchener
Verlag); Genesis 37–50, trans. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002; originally published
in 1982 by Neukirchener Verlag).
37
toward the other. Moreover, the bodies of the heroes in focus must receive
significant and explicit (if not sustained or repeated) attention to their
bodies in order to serve as meaningful topics for discussion. In the case
of the ancestors in Genesis 12–50, their role as “founding figures” is self-
explanatory, and though none of them can lay claim to the title of “king,”
they are all clearly heads of nascent Israel (indeed, one of them is “Israel”).
Regarding the category of the warrior, however, the ancestors fall flat.
We could point to Abram engaging in victorious battle in Genesis 14, Jacob
successfully wrestling in Genesis 32,12 and Gen 48:22 alluding to battle
when Jacob offers his son Joseph an extra “portion” beyond the other
sons “that I took from the hand of the Amorites with my sword and my
bow.”13 This enigmatic reference exercised ancient interpreters, who con-
nected it with the razing of Shechem in Genesis 34 (the word for “portion”
[shechem] in Gen 48:22 is identical to the name Shechem)—presuming
Jacob was actually connected with this story, or that he re-conquered the
city later. Moreover, at various points Jacob engages in activity that ges-
tures (often anti-climactically) toward martial themes, such as when Laban
accuses him of taking Rachel and Leah away “like captives of the sword”
(Gen 31:26)—though in fact Jacob had stolen away at night, intentionally
avoiding physical confrontation. The prospect of battle again arises when
Jacob learns that his estranged brother Esau plans to confront him with
400 (presumably armed) men—though Jacob cowers in fear, and avoids
combat through a shrewd act of gift-shaming.14 Faint as these indications
are, they do at least compare Jacob’s experience to military action and ges-
ture toward an identity—even if rejected or contravened—related to battle.
It is, at any rate, enough to continue to think of Jacob as a hero who signals
and guides the fate of Israel.15
12. Compare with the scene of wrestling as a heroic sport in 2 Sam 2:14–17.

13. See James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the
Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 429–31, and brief spec-
ulation about Jacob’s warrior activity in Brian R. Doak, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest
and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Boston: Ilex Foundation; Washington,
DC: Center for Hellenic Studies), 98 n. 213.
14. Victor H. Matthews, “The Unwanted Gift: Implications of Obligatory Gift Giving in
Ancient Israel,” Semeia 87 (1999): 91–104, here 96–99.
15. Jacob may of course be considered a “hero” on other grounds, some overlapping with
the categories sketched out here; e.g., Ronald S. Hendel, The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob
Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), esp.
99, where Hendel calls Jacob “a traditional hero of Israel” based on his “extreme qualities
exhibited in epic,” his role as founder, and his general religious significance.
83
The Body of the Patriarch

Twins immediately confront their social setting with a host of bodily prob-
lems.16 How can two individuals look so alike, or come from the same
womb at the same time and look so different? Are they the same person
somehow? Do their respective physicalities say something about them?
How do twins differentiate themselves from one another through speech,
dress, action, and so on? Jacob and Esau are the Hebrew Bible’s first ex-
plicit set of twins (only one other set is mentioned, Perez and Zerah [Gen
38:27–30]), and the narrator immediately identifies the brothers by their
bodily characteristics—an extreme rarity in this literature for children17—
and the problems they later encounter or create directly relate to the bodily
fate apparent at birth. The twin bodies act in a two-part drama, begin-
ning at their birth and the physical differentiation noted there and then re-
suming at the bed of their father Isaac in the scene of the stolen blessing.18
Hairy and Smooth, Part One (Genesis 25:21–26)

The first sign of body-drama emerges already within a mother’s womb,
as her twins “roiled (ratsats) within her.” The verb ratsats consistently in-
dicates violent action, such as crushing, roiling, struggling, and related
types of physical conflict (e.g., Judg 9:53; Ps 74:14; Eccl 12:6). All of this
prompts Rebekah to exclaim, “Why is this happening to me!” (Gen 25:22).
We must imagine the womb activity to be something beyond normal fetal
movement, which would be expected. Perhaps the roiling in the womb is
indeed so violent, or the presence of two babies causes double the expected
movements.
16. E.g., Kate Bacon, Twins in Society: Parents, Bodies, Space, and Talk (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 91–118.
17. Other than this passage and the baby Moses, who is described as “good” in Exod 2:2 (tov;
perhaps, “attractive” or “hearty”; see discussion on tov as a bodily term in Chapter 5 of this
book), physical descriptions of children in the Bible are non-existent. The lack of further
engagement beyond this one descriptor for Jacob prevents Stephen M. Wilson from consid-
ering Jacob under the coming-of-age rubric (Making Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in
the Hebrew Bible [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 155–56). On biblical descriptions
of children, see Julie Faith Parker, Valuable and Vulnerable: Children in the Hebrew Bible,
Especially the Elisha Cycle (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), who affirms the pivotal
role children play in the narratives where they appear (pp. 149–54 on Genesis 25).
18. John E. Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and Yhwh’s Fidelity
to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), esp. 48–86
for Genesis 25 and 27.
93
In Gen 25:25–26, Esau emerges from the womb “red all over (admoni)19
with a mantle of hair,” and his brother, Jacob, comes out “grasping the
heel” of Esau. The narrator takes the name “Jacob” (ya’akob), creatively,
to refer to the word “heel” (akev), which is at once a body part he grasps
at birth—signaling his later attempts to pull his brother back and get
ahead—and possibly a colloquial term for one who follows too closely (in
a negative sense), lies, or attempts to supplant others. As Esau bitterly
proclaims in 27:36: “Is this not why he is called ya’akob, since he akav-ed
me these two times?” (compare with the expression “lifting the heel” in Ps
41:10[9]‌). On an etymological level, however, the name ya’akob may have
nothing to do with heels or deceiving at all, as the name likely meant “May
so-and-so (a deity) protect . . .”—a fact the narrator may or may not have
known.20 Either way, the etymology demonstrates the narrator’s concern to
draw Jacob’s identity into the sphere of his bodily experience.
Moreover, the name “Esau” refers to the body as well, though in this
case directly to the character’s overall appearance. Here the narrator ap-
parently offers another etymology and means for the name to be double-
connected with hairiness and redness: Esau comes out “red all over”
(admoni kullo) and wearing a “hairy mantle” (aderet se’ar), where the terms
for both “red” (adom) and “hairy” (se’ar) correspond to Esau’s double-name
as both “Esau” (“the hairy one” [?]‌) and “Edom” (“the red one” [?]).21 The
19. Or “ruddy”; see 1 Sam 16:12, and discussion of David’s appearance in this respect in
Chapter 5 of this book.
20. Hendel, Epic of the Patriarch, 111 n. 34, who points out that ‘qb is attested with the meaning
“protect” in Amorite, Ethiopic, and Old South Arabic; see also Westermann, Genesis 12–
36, 414. It may still be the case that this term for “protect” is also related to “heel,” as in
“to (protect by) be(ing) at one’s heels,” i.e., as a rear guard behind, etc., but this is spec-
ulation. See, however, Josh 8:13, where aqev may very well mean “rear guard” (NRSV),
describing a less-fortified aspect of an encampment. For another etymological sleight of
hand involving a name, see “Moses” in Exod 2:10. In such instances, it may be the case that
the narrator wrought the etymology to make sense of something no longer understood,
or, more likely in this case, the narrator was engaging in a creative process and using two
related terms, both stemming from the root ‘qb, to facilitate symbolic understanding and
future memory. See comments on this front in Gabriella Rundblad and David B. Kronefeld,
“Folk-Etymology: Haphazard Perversion or Shrewd Analogy?” in Lexicology, Semantics, and
Lexicography: Selected Papers from the Fourth G. L. Brook Symposium, Manchester, August 1998,
ed. Julie Coleman and Christian Kay (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 19–34.
21. Genesis makes the Esau-Edom connection clear not only through genealogy (Esau is
the progenitor of the Edomites), but also through explicit notes on the identity of the two
names in Gen 25:30 and several times in Genesis 36 (vv. 8, 19, 43). On Esau’s color and
hair, see Susan Niditch, “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113–16.
04
term for “hairy,” se’ar, is probably the more philologically tenuous of the
two etymologies here because it indicates not Esau’s name but the land of
“Seir”—equated with Edom in Num 24:18, and listed as Esau’s home in
Gen 36:8.22 The “red” association returns in the story of the lost birthright
in Gen 25:29–34, where Esau’s born proclivity for the color red drives him
to sell the birthright, demanding Jacob give him “some of this red stuff”
(or more literally, “some of this red-red” [?]; ha-adom ha-adom ha-zeh), a
meaty stew Jacob had cooked. The “hairy” association returns—in par-
allel with Jacob’s “smooth” body, not mentioned in the birth narrative—
during the deathbed blessing theft in Genesis 27. The “real” etymology of
the name Esau is not known; the name appears in no other known Semitic
languages,23 though the connection between the color red and the land
of Edom seems to be a direct visual correlation (due to the red sandstone
characteristic of the region).24
Thus, we see already that the narrative is rife with bodily cues looking
forward and backward chronologically, indicating something of a built-in
“fate” the characters will inhabit.25 The text engages in a type of ancient
physiognomy, drawing conclusions about characters’ morality, activity,
and future based on physical appearance.26 One gets the impression not
so much that a character’s physical features cause their later behaviors as
much as their features express something permanent about them, some
aspect of their deepest identity as it already exists and must exist.27
22. Compare with the term for “male goat,” sa’ir (particularly prominent in Leviticus and
Numbers). The term se’ar/se’ir may, in at least its first syllable, faintly echo the name Esau.
23. Roger Syrén, The Forsaken Firstborn: A Study of a Recurrent Motif in the Patriarchal
Narratives (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 84–86, and a possible cognate term from the root
‘sy/’sw in Hendel, Epic of the Patriarch, 111 n. 34.
24. Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, revised and enlarged edi-
tion, trans. Anson F. Rainey (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979), 12–13.
25. Nachum M. Sarna, “The Anticipatory Use of Information as a Literary Feature of
the Genesis Narratives,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, ed. Richard E. Friedman
(Berkeley: University of California, 1981), 76–82, esp. 81–82 for Jacob and Esau, who focuses
(as I do in this chapter) on the literary and thematic unity such references create rather than
searching for separate authorial strands behind every incidental reference, repeated feature,
or “doublet” in the text.
26. See more on ancient physiognomy in Chapter 5 of this book.
27. Compare with a parallel notion of whether prophetic sign-act dramas “caused” events to
happen in W. David Stacey, Prophetic Drama in the Old Testament (London: Epworth, 1990),
260–82, esp. 275–82.
41
Hairy and Smooth, Part Two (Genesis 27:1–40)

The drama of the twin bodies re-emerges with serious consequences in
Genesis 27, in the famous scene at Isaac’s deathbed. This chapter offers a
hypersensory montage of bodies, by biblical standards, rife with corporeal
anxiety, touch, hearing, seeing, failing to see, and the confusion caused by
an altered body. Indeed, admittedly without making a strict statistical anal-
ysis, Genesis 27 may offer the richest bodily and sensory meditation out of
any single short scene in the Hebrew Bible.28
The bodily and sensory issues begin immediately (27:1): “When Isaac
was old and his eyes grew so dim that he could not see . . .” Viewed one way,
this fact allows space for verisimilitude in the ensuing scene—besides the
fact that Jacob tricks his father through an implausible costume and out-
right lie, Isaac’s failing eyes could account for his physical inability to see
Jacob for who he was. The problem seems to be deeper than this, however.
Isaac’s dim eyesight may reflect poorly on his judgment in light of the di-
vine plan, in that he fully intends to bless Esau over Jacob in defiance of
the divine oracular response in 25:22–33 to Rebekah (that had proclaimed
Jacob the master of his elder brother). His failing eyesight, however, can
hardly be cited as the reason for his initial intention to bless Esau. Source-
critically minded readers should, of course, be quick to point out the pos-
sibility that the oracle report in Genesis 25 may not derive from the same
authorial layer as Genesis 27, though no clear criterion comes to mind
regarding how these sources might be related to one another (e.g., which
is historically primary? what did the compiler make of their juxtaposition
once the text came into its current form?). Failing eyesight may, however,
serve as an indication of failing sensibilities on other levels as well, such as
in 1 Samuel 3, where Eli’s eyes-gone-dim join a number of other cues in the
narrative that prefigure and demonstrate the priest’s failure with his sons
and eventual death—his failure to recognize quickly the divine voice for
Samuel, the fact that the lamp of God is burning but “not yet extinguished”
(perhaps barely?) nearby in the presence of the ark, or even Eli’s mistake in
thinking Hannah is drunk in 1 Samuel 1.29
28. Some of the descriptions of the Sinai encounter also come to mind here, such as Deut
4:10–20 or some aspects of Exodus 19 and 24, though there is no focus in these texts on the
human body.
29. Eli’s failed eyesight comes up again, notably, in 1 Sam 4:15, moments before his death and
final judgment for transgressions regarding the management of his sons and perhaps other
problems as well. The New Testament, particularly in Jesus’s rhetoric and healing activity
24
Body failure is obviously a feature of old age, even as the position of

the aged, failing body and all, can indicate powers of prophecy and special
insight. Consider, for example, Jacob in Gen 48:10, whose eyes had explic-
itly grown dim; Moses in Deuteronomy 32–33, though Moses’s eyes had
notably not grown dim (Deut 34:7); David’s deathbed advice in 1 Kgs 2:1–9,
offered in a state of declining health (1 Kgs 1:1); Elisha in 2 Kgs 13:14–19;
and of course Isaac himself later in Genesis 27.30 The prophet Ahijah in 1
Kgs 14:1–17 has eyes also dimmed from old age, though he retains his keen
sense and immediately “sees” (or rather, hears) through the disguise of
Jeroboam’s wife. The blind seer Tireseus of ancient Greek literature—most
famously in Oedipus Rex—“sees” what others cannot.31 Disability can func-
tion not only as a classic “tragic flaw” (broadly conceived) but also as “com-
pensatory insight,” demonstrating, as Mitchell and Snyder put it, that “the
meaning-laden significance of disability must be recognized for its social
layering, its predictive consequences, and its psychological, albeit angst-
ridden, complexity.”32 The image of Homer (and his often-thought-to-be-
cipher Demodocus in the Odyssey, book 8) as a blind-inspired poet in the
classical Greek world applies here as well, as the Muse curses Demodocus
with blindness and simultaneously blesses him with the power of poetic
song (8.63–64).33 We find something of this same layering in the presen-
tation of Isaac’s ailment in Gen 27:1: His failing eyes truly do fail him and
his older son Esau in the blessing debacle, though they simultaneously see
more effectively into Jacob’s status in the thrust of the narrative.
Fearing he will be found out immediately through the touch of his body,
Jacob protests to his mother: “Esau my brother is a hairy man, but I am
a smooth (chalaq) man” (Gen 27:11). This additional bodily information
(e.g., Mark 8:14–38; John 9:35–41), but also for the apostle Paul (Acts 9:18), uses images of
sight and blindness in this way, to indicate larger, non-physical realities. See some com-
ments in Jane Heath, “Sight and Christianity: Early Christian Attitudes to Seeing,” in Sight
and the Ancient Senses, ed. Michael Squire (London: Routledge, 2016), 220–36, here 235–36.
30. Expanded list in Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 437.
31. Lindsay Coo, “Sight and Blindness: The Mask of Thamyris,” in Sight and the Ancient
Senses, ed. Michael Squire (London: Routledge, 2016), 237–48, here 242–43. On the com-
plexity and meaning of blindness in later Jewish thought, see Rachel Neis, The Sense of
Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), e.g., 69–70, 131–33.
32. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Representations of Disability, History of,” in
the Encyclopedia of Disability, vol. 5, ed. Gary L. Albrecht (London: Sage, 2006), 1382–94,
here 1384.
33. Coo, “Sight and Blindness,” 238–40.
43
regarding Jacob’s smoothness continues to forge a set of sharp dualities

for the brothers present throughout the narratives:34
Esau Jacob
older younger
lesser/servant greater/mastera
Edom Israel
hunter/wilderness tents/domestic
nature culture
stupid/sensory crafty/mind
favoritism by father favoritism by mother
eats food prepares food
rejected chosen
hairy smooth
a
Cf. Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster, 59–62, who translates “the older
[Esau] will serve the younger [Jacob]” in Gen 25:23 differently, as “the greater
[Esau] will serve the lesser [Jacob].”
The description of Jacob as “smooth”/chalaq may carry with it valences

beyond mere bodily smoothness. Biblical authors frequently use the
term chalaq in a wide variety of texts to refer to that which is deceptive,
to flattering false prophecies, and to the illusion created by what only ap-
pears wonderful on the outside (Isa 30:10; Ezek 12:24; Ps 12:3 [Engl. 12:2–
3]; Ps 73:18; Prov 5:3, 26:28; Dan 11:32). The current English use of the
word “slick” can serve as a parallel—a road may be “slick” in terms of its
smooth slipperiness, but used in other situations for non-physical realities
the term carries with it connotations of cleverness and ingenuity, or per-
haps even a negative valence, as in the slick tactics a dishonest salesperson
might use to sell a product. Just as Isaac’s eyes are dim in two ways, so too
Jacob is smooth in two ways.35
34. The notion that bodies construct and participate in conceptions of binary traits has
long been a part of gender discourse on the body in scholarship; see, e.g., a basic overview
in Julia Coffey, Body Work: Youth, Gender, and Health (London: Routledge, 2016), 23–24,
and the classic work of Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”
(London: Routledge, 1993).
35. Similarly, Niditch, My Brother Esau, 115.
4
What if my father attempts to feel my skin, Jacob asks. The two will
come into contact; Isaac will feel the smooth skin and uncover the plot
Rebekah has hatched after she overhears the conversation between Isaac
and Esau, and the result will be curse instead of blessing. The solution
involves role-playing, in costume: Jacob will wear Esau’s clothes. Though
disguises appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Tamar in Genesis 38:14–
19; the Gibeonites in Josh 9:1–15; Jeroboam’s wife in 1 Kgs 14:1–17; Ahab
in 1 Kgs 22), this passage is unique in that part of Jacob’s disguise, the
animal skins, are meant to represent his actual body, with hairy arms.
He attempts, as it were, to crawl inside Esau’s body, to inhabit it tempo-
rarily to be the body that Isaac will bless. No one in the narrative wonders
how this spoken blessing would “transfer bodies” back to the “real Jacob,”
demonstrating the perceived physical, material reality of blessing—the
narrator imagines the blessing as a tangible thing that sticks to or enters
another tangible thing, regardless of the blesser’s “spiritual” intentions or
some “inner identity” of the human. In other words, bodily presence rules
the spiritual logic of this moment in the text.
The scene at Isaac’s deathbed rides a razor’s edge between comedy and
tragedy.36 Rebekah covers Jacob’s hands and neck with goatskins, and the
reader must wonder whether human hands covered with animal skins
could truly pass as hairy human hands. Isaac suspects a ruse immediately,
and asks for Jacob-as-Esau to draw close, then questioning him again,
then smelling him and falling for the disguise after this final smell-test.
Isaac perceives a voice-touch mismatch, hearing Jacob but feeling Esau,
but the smell of Esau’s clothes pushes Isaac over the edge and he offers
the blessing. Esau’s reaction (Gen 27:30–40) is one of the most affecting
in all of ancient literature: Isaac trembles, and Esau openly bursts into
horrible tears, begging for a final blessing, imagining, hoping—as anyone
might—that Isaac surely has another blessing to give. Callously or duti-
fully or piously, Isaac proclaims that he cannot undo the first blessing. In
the midst of this scene, Esau bitterly raises the specter of Jacob’s name,
ya’akov, related to the word for “heel,” aqev. Thus the “heel” reference in
the twins’ birth narrative comes full circle: just as Jacob had grasped his
brother’s hairy heel at birth, he grasps it again, pulling him back by falsely
inhabiting his brother’s body.
36. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, revised and updated (New York: Basic Books,
2011),  52–54.
45
Kerry Wynn offers a partial challenge to the reading I offer here in her
essay on “normate hermeneutics” and the representation of disability in
Genesis.37 Wynn characterizes a “normate” reading, in terms of the Bible,
as one by which interpreters read their own cultural assumptions about dis-
ability into the text, as opposed to closer (and presumably better?) attention
to “the text itself” (presumably the original historical situation of the author
and first audience?).38 Wynn contends that the blind Isaac of Genesis 27 is
“the classic example of a biblical character disabled by the normate herme-
neutic” and proceeds to show various styles of interpretation—overlapping
with my own here—by which Isaac’s blindness is viewed not as a natural part
of the human life cycle, accompanying advanced age, but rather as a (nega-
tive) moral or spiritual category.39 Isaac is tricked—he is not actually “disa-
bled” before Rebekah and Jacob disable him through their antics. Any notion
of Isaac’s physical condition as a moral or symbolic problem in the narrative
is, for Wynn, neither fair nor accurate.
For example, Wynn criticizes Susan Niditch’s attempt to see a par-
allel between blindness and death, mentioned one after the other in 27:1
and 27:2, respectively, because, for Wynn, the passage is prose, not po-
etry, and thus the literary concept of parallelism shouldn’t apply.40 This
is not a helpful criticism, however, at least from a literary standpoint.
Parallelism functions as a key component of ancient Israelite textual con-
struction through every genre, and at any rate the division between “prose”
and “poetry” is, as James Kugel has argued, not as clean as one might
37. Kerry H. Wynn, “The Normate Hermeneutic and Interpretations of Disability in Yahwistic

Narratives,” in This Abled Body: Rethinking Disability and Biblical Studies, ed. Hector Avalos,
Sarah Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 91–101.
For a similar argument about Isaac, see Sarah J. Melcher, “Genesis and Exodus,” in The
Bible and Disability: A Commentary, ed. Sarah J. Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, and Amos Yong
(Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017), 29–56, here 43.
38. Wynn, “Normate Hermeneutic,” 92. I parenthetically note the two questions here—
about whether imposing one’s own cultural assumptions upon a text is “better” than not
doing so, and whether the truest site of meaning is “the text,” perhaps with the implication
that the earliest historical context of the text is the most important (Wynn does mention the
“historical context” explicitly on p. 96)—because they are assumptions built in to Wynn’s
argument that are at least questionable and not argued in the essay.
39. Wynn, “Normate Hermeneutic,” 93.
40. Wynn, “Normate Hermeneutic,” 94, citing Susan Niditch, A Prelude to Biblical
Folklore: Underdogs and Tricksters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; originally pub-
lished by Harper and Row, 1987), 83.
64
want.41 It may be the case that the passage should be understood, as Wynn
contends, in light of a legal metaphor from Nuzi,42 but it is flatly inaccu-
rate to claim, as Wynn does, that “there is no basis for associating blind-
ness in this passage with death or powerlessness.”43 On the contrary, the
most plain reading of “the text” indicates that the narrator very much sees
Isaac’s blindness in light of his impending death—the mere fact that they
are mentioned together already serves as a potential basis (even if not, ul-
timately, a compelling one). Moreover, what urgency would the deathbed
blessing have otherwise, if Isaac were not near death, and what of the rec-
ognition drama, predicated on Isaac’s inability to see Jacob, that ensues in
Gen 27:11–29? On this front, we should also notice the subtle moment of
synesthetic confusion that ensues in 27:27, invoking the problem of sight,
as Isaac proclaims, “See (re’eh/ra’ah)—the smell (reyach) of my son.”44 As
Wynn accurately points out, visual confusion also plagues Jacob, where
he fails to perceive the correct wife in the wedding-night-mix-up scene in
Gen 29:23–25.45 Having said all of this, as I have already noted, it may also
be the case that the blindness represents a special power to see what God
sees—Jacob is to be blessed, not Esau.
The problem of the identification and misidentification of the body
dominates the encounter, as Jacob is identified with another person’s body
and then re-identified with his own body, via the heel reference. Jacob
thus already has begun to define himself as a hero who uses his body
in distinctive ways to advance himself in the world. Moreover, perhaps
better than viewing Isaac’s blindness and his own bodily role as either a
devaluing “disability” and a purely negative moral feature or, alternatively,
as a merely incidental marker of Isaac’s old age, we should see the bodies
41. See James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981); Kugel’s views in this respect have not gone unchallenged;
see, e.g., Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1985).
42. Invoking the Nuzi texts as “parallels” to the ancestral narratives, a stock feature of cer-
tain aspects of twentieth-century American historical comparison, has been severely (and
fairly) problematized in many ways; see, e.g., Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the
Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974).
44. The other classic case of synesthesia in the Torah comes in Exod 20:18, as the Israelites
“saw” the “sounds” of the Lord at Sinai. In both Gen 27:27 and Exod 20:18, we may under-
stand the verb ra’ah, “see,” as something more like “take note!” or “witnessed,” respectively.
4
7
in fluid states, of ability and disability, insight and failure, marking the
same individual.
Hairy and Smooth Bodies in Comparative Perspective

Interpreting Esau’s hairy body vis-à-vis Jacob’s smooth body takes on ad-
ditional dimensions when viewed in light of comparable ancient mater-
ials.46 Most often cited is the Gilgamesh Epic, particularly the description of
Enkidu in the first and second tablets of the standard edition.47 Gilgamesh
himself sports a nice beard and thick hair (I.59–60), but Enkidu’s hairi-
ness stands out (I.105–112):
All his body is matted with hair,

He is adorned with tresses like a woman:
The locks of his hair grow as thickly as Nissaba’s,
He knows not at all a people nor even a country.
He was clad in a garment like Sakkan’s,
Feeding on grass with the very gazelles.
Jostling at the water-hole with the herd,
He enjoyed the water with the animals.
The connection between Enkidu’s whole body full of hair and his status
as a near-animal, feeding on grass and drinking out of puddles, could not
be more clear—the unkempt, unhuman hair marks his wild status. His
food consumption, like Esau’s (Gen 25:29–34),48 seems driven by ani-
mality and lack of foresight, while this situation will be decisively reversed
46. A more robust discussion of the meaning of “heroic hair” appears for Samson and
Absalom in Chapters 3 and 8, respectively; see Niditch, My Brother Esau,  25–62.
47. See the text and edition (used and quoted here) by Andrew R. George, The Babylonian
Gilgamesh Epic. Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003); the “Standard Edition,” which I quote, is in vol. 1, 531–735.
48. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 48–49, convincingly shows that the biblical narrator at-
tempts to demean Esau in the eating scene of Genesis 25. Philo of Alexandria spoke in
allegorical terms not only of Esau’s appetite and its connection to carnal degradation but
also his hair, which further gestured toward notions of animality, gluttony, and rampant sex-
uality; see Karl Olav Sandnes, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 119–20. For a discussion of Esau and Jacob as a family pair repre-
senting “nature and culture,” esp. with reference to hairiness, see John T. Noble, A Place for
Hagar’s Son: Ishmael as a Case Study in the Priestly Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016),
22–25; one of the first to make the connection between Gilgamesh and Esau explicit was
Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 196.
84
during Enkidu’s fateful journey to full-human status with the Shamhat

character. In the Penn Tablet (an Old Babylonian version that preserves a
fuller account of Enkidu’s transformation), Enkidu sits down to eat after a
sexual marathon but remains bewildered at bread and beer, the hallmarks
of food-civilization in ancient Mesopotamia (col. iii.87–112). Taught to eat
by the woman Shamhat, he then learns how to be human, a transition
quickly followed by a haircut and proper clothing: “The barber treated his
body so hairy, he anointed himself with oil and became a man. He put on
a garment, becoming like a warrior.”49
As Gregory Mobley observes in his review of the medieval “wild man”
tradition and its echoes in biblical and other ancient Near Eastern litera-
ture, hairiness primarily marks the wild man in all his iterations during
the medieval period.50 The Bible’s hairy men are usually no different, ex-
hibiting barbaric or other uncontrollable traits associated with nature. The
list includes not only Esau but also Samson (Judges 14–16), Elijah (2 Kgs
1:8), and Nebuchadnezzar (Dan 4:3).51 We should resist the urge, however,
to universalize the meaning of hairiness outside of specific indicators in
the text that might point us in one direction or the other—long hair could
be a sign of piety or rebellion (note, e.g., the Nazirite vow prohibiting hair-
cuts in Num 6:5), beards a sign of barbarism and exclusion or appropriate
male virility and inclusion, and so on.52 It is difficult, at any rate, to avoid
the conclusion that hairiness in the context of Jacob and Esau in Genesis
25 and 27 alludes to an animal nature, an un-groomed, unkempt wild-
man, devoid of the understanding necessary to please God.53
Esther Hamori has a made a provocative, and, I think, mostly persua-
sive case that the Jacob stories in Genesis 25–32 track along with (and
directly borrow from) the Gilgamesh Epic— particularly involving the
wrestling match between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.54 She finds a cluster
of shared features in the stories, most of which do not belong with one
49. George, Gilgamesh Epic, vol. 1, 172–92.

50. Gregory Mobley, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” JBL 116.2
(1997): 217–233, here 218.
51. Mobley, “Wild Man,” 226–28.
52. A point obvious throughout the essays in Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang
(eds.), Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2008).
53. Cf. Niditch, My Brother Esau, 113–14, who argues that being “red”/ruddy and having a
hairy mantle can be seen as positive attributes.
54. Esther J. Hamori, “Echoes of Gilgamesh in the Jacob Story,” JBL 130.4 (2011): 625–42.
94
another naturally (thus weakening the argument that they exist in both
stories by coincidence or some broader storytelling pattern): the specter
of a nocturnal attacker, unknown to the victim, attacking at night; the
lack of lethal intent from the attacker; the fact that the combatants are un-
armed (rare and a bit odd in ancient stories of fighting); the status of the
fight as a rite of passage for the attacked character; and the ultimate am-
biguity about who wins the fight. These shared features between Genesis
and Gilgamesh, however, are not limited to the fight scene (reflected in
Genesis 32). They reverberate throughout the story cycles more generally,
including aspects such as the relation to a mentor-mother figure (Rebekah
for Jacob, and the unnamed mother for Gilgamesh) and the clear notion
of a brother-pair as a culture/nature reflection—including the feature of
the hairy person. If her analysis is correct, then the hair and body issues
would indeed be directly comparable to the Gilgamesh scene and mark an
important moment of differentiation between Jacob and Esau.55
One other reflex of the hairy/smooth theme with relation to brothers
deserves mention from the ancient world: Philo of Byblos’s second-century
ce account of the brother pair Hypsouranios and Ousoos, whom Philo
says quarreled with one another for some unstated reason. Hypsouranios
is presented as a founder of urban culture at Tyre, innovator of domestic
space (huts), while Ousoos discovered body-coverings made of animal
hides.56 The connection between the hairy body of Esau and Jacob’s at-
tempt to mimic him through wearing animal skins has seemed, to some
interpreters, to mirror the bodies and dynamic between Hypsouranios and
Ousoos. However, the overall correspondences are rather thin beyond the
basics of brotherly conflict and the domestic/nature binary (which breaks
down later in Philo, vis-à-vis the Jacob-Esau dynamic, because we are told
that the urban Hypsouranios’s descendants invent hunting and fishing
[i.e., hunting is related to Esau in Genesis]).57
55. Hamori, “Echoes,” 633–34 on the hair in particular.

56. Harold W. Attridge and Robert A. Oden Jr., Philo of Byblos. The Phoenician History.
Introduction, Critical Text, Translation, Notes (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association
of America, 1981), 42–43.
57. Attridge and Oden, Philo, 82–83 n. 56 are duly suspicious of the comparison between
sets of brothers, while Hendel includes it in his review of comparable situations (Epic of the
Patriarch, 125–28). The similarity between “Esau” and “Ousoos” is a coincidence (“Usu” is an
ancient name for mainland Tyre, as noted by Hendel, Epic of the Patriarch, 126), even if some
modern lexicographers suggest a potential connection.
05
Hip Wrenching
Genesis 32:25–32 records perhaps the most significant yet ambiguous he-
roic bodily moment involving the nation’s founding ancestors.58 Jacob pre-
pares, anxiously, to meet his brother Esau, long separated after his trickery
but now headed home, with wives, children, and property in tow. The pa-
triarch stalls by the river Jabbok:
(v. 25 [Engl. v. 24]) Jacob remained by himself, and a man grappled

with him until sunrise. (26) When he saw that he was not able to
overcome him, he struck the socket of his thigh (kaph-yerek)59 and
dislocated the socket of Jacob’s thigh [or “hip”] as he grappled with
him. (27) He said, “release me, for the sun is about to come up,”
but he replied, “I will not release you until you bless me.” (28) He
answered him: “What is your name?” and he replied, “Jacob.” (29)
Then he said, “He will not be called Jacob any longer—rather, your
name is ‘Israel,’ for you struggled with God and with men and have
overcome.” (30) Jacob pleaded (with him): “Tell me your name!” He
58. This passage boasts a large amount of attention in the secondary literature and many
separate issues to discuss (e.g., source critical problems, the identity of Jacob’s assailant),
much of which cannot be dealt with here. See, e.g., Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 512–21, and
more recent analysis in Hamori, When Gods Were Men, 96–101; Mark S. Smith, “The Three
Bodies of God in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 134.3 (2015): 471–88, here 475–77; Mark S. Smith
“Remembering God: Collective Memory in Israelite Religion,” CBQ 64.4 (2002): 631–51,
here 640–44. On the source-critical problem, see Hutton, “Jacob’s ‘Two Camps.’ ”
59. Roland Boer, “The Patriarch’s Nuts: Concerning the Testicular Logic of Biblical Hebrew,”
JMMS 5.2 (2011): 41–52, here 47, suggests, entertainingly but with a questionable philological
standard, that kaph-yerek here indicates the groin/testicles. The verb for “dislocated” in the
verse, yaqa, seems in the hiphil to indicate the act of causing something to “hang down” from
another thing—such as the visceral effect of being impaled (Num 25:4; 2 Sam 21:6, 9, 13
[hophal]). Thus the traditional rendering, of a displacement of the hip-socket, still makes the
most sense. Yerek does carry an expanded semantic range beyond merely the “thigh” alone,
however. Here we may cite the odd ritual, occurring only twice in the entire Bible (in Genesis
24 and 47), (1) wherein a servant is adjured to “put your hand under my thigh (yerek)” as
an oath for obtaining a wife for Jacob’s father, Isaac, not from among the local Canaanite
population but rather from the family group in Aram (Gen 24:1–9) and (2) for Jacob to com-
mand Joseph to take his body up from Egypt and back into the promised land for burial.
Boer insists, more strongly than most interpreters (“The Patriarch’s Nuts,” 46–47), on the
understanding here of the yerek, “thigh,” as the genitals, a meaning congruent with the
nature of the promise in Genesis 24 in particular (given the content of the vow—having to
do with procreation). Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men
and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 87–88, claims that the ritual in Genesis 47,
though not connected to procreation, offers us a patriarch who “has exposed his nakedness
intentionally in the process of asserting his power and status. The penis is the symbol of the
patrilineage itself” (quote here from p. 88).
51
said, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. (31) So
Jacob named that place “Face of God” [Peni-El], for (he said) “I saw
God face to face, and my life was spared.” (32) The sun rose upon
him as he crossed by Face of God, and he was limping upon his
thigh. (33) Therefore the Israelites do not eat the hip-sinew/muscle
that is on the thigh-socket of the thigh, to this day, for he struck the
thigh-socket (kaph-yerek) of Jacob at the hip-sinew/muscle.
Concepts of battle, divine encounter, national origins, and the body fuse
into a loaded, bizarre scene. Most important for our purposes, the body
dominates the text—close physical grappling, hips, faces, limping, sinew,
and joint-sockets. The concept of wrestling (here avaq, a verbal root that
presumably indicates wrestling but not otherwise attested in the Hebrew
Bible), particularly without weapons,60 raises the stakes of the physical en-
counter in personal, bodily terms; the men grapple with each other limb
to limb. This wrestling reminds us of Jacob’s first body-to-body wrestling
encounter, in the womb with Esau in Gen 25:22. The pericope in Gen
32:25–33 resides within a nest of references to Esau, to seeing his “face” (a
key word 32:20, and then again in 32:31–32) and then the actual meeting
in 33:1–11 (again, with reference to the “face” in 33:10).61 Such a connec-
tion might push us to view Esau as the attacker (even if in some symbolic
sense), and in fact the text itself gestures, ambiguously, toward not one but
several possibilities for the attacker’s identity (Esau; an unknown “man”;
an angel or other divine figure; God).
The physicality of the humans in the story plays an etiological role, as
Jacob’s new name, yisra-el, folk-etymologically gestures toward the verb
sarah, “wrestle.” Sarah itself is an ambiguous term that appears only one
other time in the Bible with the meaning “wrestle” (in Hosea 12:3[4]‌, which
repeats, in brief, the story from Genesis 32).62 The repeated emphasis on
the face (pen) in the story and the naming of the place as “Face-of-God”
(Peni-El), as well as the disjointed hip, its accompanying limp, and the food
prohibition associated with the meat at the thigh/hip muscle all continue
to link key bodily references in the story to elements of Israelite geography
and tradition.
60. Hamori, “Echoes,” 629–30, on this aspect of the story.

61. Smith, “Remembering God,” 640–44.
62. Otherwise, the Hebrew sarah, as in the name of the matriarch “Sarah,” means “princess.”
25
Even through these repeated references, much here is not narrated,

not named, and not viewed.63 The reference to the eating prohibition is
about as obscure as such things get in biblical food laws (it is not even a
“law,” but a reference to a tradition observed “to this day” [Gen 32:32]).64
The meaning of seeing “God’s face” becomes bound up with other biblical
texts that deny such encounters are possible at all (e.g., Exod 33:20), or
imply that face-to-face encounters are the privilege of Moses alone (Exod
33:11), or speak of the divine face in terms of prayer, supplication, or favor
(e.g., Num 6:24–26; Pss 4:7[Engl. v. 6], 80:20[19], 102:3[2]‌, etc.). And the
etymology of the title “Israel,” philologically not “he wrestles with God”
but perhaps “El will Rule,” “Let El Rule,” or “El strives/contends,”65 re-
mains mysterious for historical reasons—why would the very name of the
nation, Israel, not contain some aspect of the theophoric element YHWH,
the Israelite national deity? And why is the naming episode repeated, al-
most as though it had never happened at all, in Gen 35:9–15? Surely source
critical considerations explain some of these disjunctions, as may sensitive
literary readings focusing on doubling and plot and character, but we are
still left with a final text that fundamentally connects the name “Israel”
with the intensely corporeal scene in Genesis 32 and yet one that leaves
only tantalizing clues about what all of this means for Jacob’s body and the
corporate body of Israel that proceeds after him.
At this point I would like to mark two different trajectories down which
we might travel when analyzing Jacob’s body in Genesis 32: one through
the insights of disability theory as a narrative approach to the Hebrew Bible
and the other through the Greek Homeric model of the wounded hero.
63. Samuel Tongue, “Scripted Bodies: Reading the Spectacle of Jacob Wrestling with the
Angel,” JMMS 6.1 (2012): 20–37.
64. E.g., Jordan D. Rosenblum, The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 20–21.
65. See discussion and sources in Hans-Jürgen Zobel, “yiśrā’ēl,” TDOT 6 (1990): 397–420;
Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18–50 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1995), 334–35 and C. T. R. Hayward, Interpretations of the Name Israel in Ancient Judaism and
Some Early Christian Writings: From Victorious Athlete to Heavenly Champion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), esp. 18–37. On the relationship between El and YHWH, see Mark S.
Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 32–43.
53
Disabling Wound
In recent literature, disability theorists have fruitfully investigated texts
on the basis of social constructions of physical (dis)ability.66 These dis-
tinctions are not “natural” or obvious but rather societies and their texts
actively construct and negotiate the boundaries between abled and disa-
bled—and thus concepts of disability mark loaded moments of definition
in that process of construction and negotiation. Does Jacob’s limp des-
ignate him as “disabled” in this text? In what sense? And what does this
have to say about his body and the larger development of Jacob’s heroism
in Genesis?
For Saul Olyan, disability in many biblical texts serves to accentuate the
deity’s overwhelming power—thus the Lord’s ability to throw off Jacob’s
natural gait may have nothing necessarily positive or negative whatsoever
to say about Jacob but rather indicates divine power over human weak-
ness.67 Kerry Wynn also draws the clear line between “woundedness”
in the sense of disability and “powerlessness, ugliness, weirdness, and
oddness,” all of which are “metaphors of loss for the Western church.”68
Considered this way, the limp makes a statement about the deity’s prov-
idential control over what at times could appear, in the sundry ancestral
narratives of Genesis, to be mere human bungling or achievement (as the
case may be). To be sure, tension between the poles of human freedom or
victory and divine guidance everywhere mark this literature, to the point
that we may not be so surprised to see the Lord needing to hold up his
end of the tension over humans in terms of power. However, reading this
moment of wounding only on those terms seems reductive or gratuitous.
What reader or character in the narrative truly needed to be reminded that
God was “in control” in this way?
However, the wrestling match in Genesis 32 oddly leaves open the
possibility that Jacob and his opponent wrestle to a kind of draw, or even
that Jacob is at least partly victorious—“the man” has to beg Jacob to re-
lease him, and Jacob refuses unless conditions of blessing are met (Gen
66. See Chapter 1 in this book for a review.

67. Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10.
45
32:26).69 If anything, the story itself suggests the tension between human
and divine agency to be as weird as it ever gets in the Bible, and hardly a
one-sided power display.
We do not know the severity of Jacob’s limp. We do not know whether
we are to imagine it as a lifelong condition; no later narrator depicts Jacob
limping.70 Limping seems not to be the defining characteristic of Jacob’s
physicality, at any rate, though it could serve, magnetically, as a focal
point for thinking about his supposedly new way of interacting with God
and others after Genesis 32. Indeed, although no clear or new pattern of
interacting with God seems evident after the fight, some might read the
encounter to signal a personal spiritual insight—for example, when we
encounter God we will be changed, wounded, shown to be who we re-
ally are, or something along those lines. Wynn circumvents some of these
problems by attempting to see Jacob’s wound in more mundane terms: he
simply does what he needs to do to get what he needs. He pushes past his
disability, and receives the blessing—the blessing having nothing intrinsi-
cally to do with the limp—and goes on his way.71
Bodily wounding of this type may be viewed differently, however, more
productive to the analysis of Jacob as a heroic figure in the narrative. When
applied to victims, prisoners, or the tortured, as in Michel Foucault’s no-
table analysis in Discipline and Punish, the body serves as an inscription
surface for messages of domination. We observe the opposite side of this
equation in the body of the king, which is displayed in such a way as to
emphasize his “surplus power.”72 This is the trajectory of the meaning
69. Amos Yong, The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision for the People of God
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 31, reads the limp here as a sign of outright strength—
especially given the fact that “Jacob the disabled one was no less ferocious after his injury”
(i.e., as he forced the blessing out of the assailant).
70. As pointed out by Jeremy Schipper, “Plotting Bodies in Biblical Narrative,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Biblical Narrative, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 389–97, here 396, citing Wynn (“Normate Hermeneutic,” 99), where he notes that
interpreters seem to assume the limp was temporary without evidence (cf. Yong, Bible,
Disability, and Church, 30–32, who seems to assume it is permanent). Note the bizarre at-
tempt to diagnose Jacob’s exact medical condition underlying the limp by Leonard J. Hoenig,
“Jacob’s Limp,” Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism 126.4 (1997): 684–88, who sees the
limp as the temporary result of “neurapraxia of the sciatic nerve.”
71. Wynn, “Normate Hermeneutic,” 98, 100–101. See Schipper, Disability Studies, 30–32, for
the problem of disability as the defining characteristic of the disabled person, and the per-
sonal responses disability evokes.
72. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995; originally published in 1975 by Editions Gallimard), 29, and
5
of disability identified by Saul Olyan. But when wounding occurs in the

course of what narrators or readers consider to be a heroic struggle, the
meaning of the wound can pivot radically from shame to glory, from stig-
mata to trophy. Jacob has been considered worthy to have bodily contact
with the deity—even those who “see” or interact through conversation with
God in profound ways (e.g., Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel) do not physically
touch God in this manner. Stunningly, Jacob’s victory in this encounter
is proclaimed directly by the nighttime assailant (v. 29): you struggled with
God and with men and have overcome.
Heroic Wound
Studies of wounding in the Greek heroic corpus, spanning from Homer
through the classical period, illuminate something of this other dynamic—
of wounding as a heroic trope that extols the virtue and prestige of the
warrior. For example, Tamara Neal proclaims the centrality of injury in
the Homeric corpus: “sustaining injury identifies the Iliadic warrior”; in-
jury validates and serves as “a little mark of heroic achievement and an
essential component in the ontogeny of the epic hero.”73 Furthermore, the
integration of “wounding episodes” into larger narrative themes in this lit-
erature shows that significant injury was not merely a “one-off” plot event
to show toughness in isolated situations but rather it is constitutive of he-
roic experience writ large.74 Neal observes that heroic woundings (1) show
bravery in the battle itself, (2) extol the hero through the enemy who enacts
the wound, (3) highlight weaponry, (4) elicit “moral courage” in the face of
pain, (5) provide opportunity to showcase endurance, and (6) gain divine
attention for the wounded hero.75 Immediately we may recognize five out
of these six characteristics—notably, weapons do not appear in Genesis
32—in the physical encounter Jacob has with the deity, in ways that are
essentially self-explanatory. Jacob is no Homeric hero, to be clear, but we
25–30 on the question of torture or wounding and the body. I came to this source with ref-
erence to bodily “stigmata” by way of the review of Foucault in Safwat Marzouk, Egypt as
Monster in the Book of Ezekiel (Berlin: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 56–59.
73. Tamara Neal, The Wounded Hero: Non-Fatal Injury in Homer’s Iliad (Bern: Peter Lang,
2006), 1, 15.
74. Neal, Wounded Hero, 113–50.
75. Neal, Wounded Hero,  18–44.
65
might begin to consider his injury in ways that identify him in terms of
heroic nobility, bravery, and combat honor.76
Moreover, as Neal argues for her materials, the “how and when” of in-
jury reveal a lot77—the fact that Jacob is neither wounded by the progress
of time, nor by Esau, whom he fears but whose wrath he shrewdly escapes
a second time in Genesis 33 (through gift-shaming and then an outright lie
in 33:15–17), but by the very deity, indicates that we are to view the limp as
a badge of honor, part of Jacob’s psycho-physical set of war injuries. Jacob
has been bested by no one—again, as “the man” says: “you struggled with
God and with men and have overcome.” “The risk of death that injury en-
tails,” as Neal puts it, “and the successful avoidance of death, alludes to
innate valour and heroic worth.”78 Unlike the narrative meaning of heroic
wounding in the Iliad, however, Jacob’s limp is nowhere explicitly drawn
into the larger narrative arc of the ancestral stories. No one notices or dis-
cusses Jacob’s limp later, and no other patriarch or matriarch is ever in-
jured (notwithstanding the threat to Isaac in Genesis 22). Perhaps one
could detect some glimmer of a hurt, aging man in Gen 47:9, when Jacob
comes down to Egypt, meets Pharaoh, and proclaims: “few and horrible
(ra’im) have been the years of my life . . .”
The recognition of limitation introduced by Jacob’s limp may reveal
other valences for his heroic status. Another angle on Jacob’s bodily en-
counter in Genesis 32, again drawn from the field of Greek materials,
could be pursued on the grounds of vulnerability as a virtue—as argued
by Marina Berzins McCoy.79 On philosophical and social grounds, McCoy
contends that vulnerability in all forms—but especially, when considering
Greek epic and tragedy, demonstrated by bodily wounding—binds people
76. For another classical heroic comparison, note also the broad ranging literary and symbolic
analysis by Peter L. Hays, The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature (New York: New York
University Press, 1971), 24–27. Hays reads Jacob’s experience as parallel with Aeneas’s in
the Iliad (Book 5), whose hip socket was also injured by a deity (Diomedes), and who also
goes on to found a nation (Rome). Hays (Limping Hero, 27) claims these scenes “manifested
sacred kingship,” and the archetypal wounds indicate “greater goods—more crops, flocks,
children—and, thereby, greater happiness for his people.”
77. Various examples in Neal, Wounded Hero, 63–112 (for the Achaean army), 113–50 (for the
Trojans).
78. Neal, Wounded Hero, 267.
79. Marina Berzins McCoy, Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek
Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
57
to one another and forms the most basic adhesive for human community.
Injury requires healers and often a long process for the wounded after
the incident; sometimes a single hero embodies both healer and warrior
traits.80 Thus we need not see wounding, even on heroic terms and in texts
where heroes run rampant, as only a brawny victory trophy, and a sign of
“strength” on physical terms alone.
Jacob’s body is not a lone or solitary body; it carries direct implications
for Israel as a nation, a political and religious community, going forward.
As noted earlier, in Gen 35:9–15, God names Jacob “Israel” again, a doublet
that highlights the strangeness of the wrestling account and its connection
to the name of the new nation born from Jacob’s body.81 As Hamori deftly
points out, though we might have expected Jacob to fight Esau, given the
struggle already in the womb and the political narrative already injected
into the story when Esau is first identified as “Edom” (in Gen 25:30; see
also 36:1, 8, and 19), Jacob fights God—marking Jacob and God as those in
relationship.82
Conclusion: A Criss-Crossed Body
A profound scene unfolds before Jacob’s/Israel’s death in Gen 48:13–20,
in which bodies visually enact the drama of land, promise, primogeniture,
and reversal that had hitherto formed the core of the ancestral struggle up
to that point. Joseph carefully leads his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh,
to his father Israel for blessing. The narrator lays out the bodily positions
like stage directions: Manasseh, the older, on Joseph’s left but Israel’s right,
to ensure the eldest receives the primary blessing, and the younger on the
other side. Jacob/Israel, however, defies Joseph’s wishes and re-enacts the
primogeniture reversal marking familial situations since Cain and Abel in
Genesis 3: he crosses his hands and reverses the blessings. Though we can
reasonably translate the verb skl in the phrase sikkel et-yadaw as “crossed”—
“he (Jacob) crossed his hands” (Gen 48:14)—the dominant meaning of
skl is “to be wise, diligent, understanding.” Indeed, skl seems to have no
other clear meaning apart from wisdom, understanding, insight, and the
80. McCoy, Wounded Heroes,  22–25.

81. For priestly and redactional issues in this passage, see, e.g., Westermann, Genesis 12–36,
552–54.
82. Hamori, “Echoes,” 637–38.
85
like.83 The intentionally criss-crossed hands of blessing come as more of

a surprise since we learn Jacob had fallen ill and must struggle to even sit
up in bed (Gen 48:2), and that Jacob, with resonances of his own father’s
eyesight at the blessing scene (Gen 27:1), had gone blind (Gen 48:10).
Nevertheless he sees through his blindness, and his body knows what to
do. Corporeality comes into line with the fate of the plot.
Of all the heroic bodies analyzed in this study, Jacob’s is perhaps the
most ambiguous, the most open to multiple meanings.84 However it is
interpreted, Jacob’s own body, most described among the ancestors, sets a
basic bodily storyline for actors in heroic drama throughout the Bible: he-
roic action will involve the body at primary and nuanced levels, and the marks
of heroic identity are written upon the body through its appearance, injuries,
strength, and vulnerability. Depictions of heroic “masculinity” in Jacob’s life
range from the civilization he embodies (versus Esau) through cut hair,
smooth skin, and tent-dwelling cultural sophistication, to intellectual qual-
ities such as foresight, trickery, and rhetoric, and also to impaired phys-
icality (the limp) and non-straightforward movements (the criss-crossed
hands of blessing). The ancestral stories in general and the bodies we find
throughout Genesis, but most significantly Jacob’s, leave us with a strong
impression that the fate of Israel will be connected with the fate of the he-
roic body. Where the body goes, the nation goes.
83. Interpreters have struggled to understand how skl could mean “cross,” as most assume
it must mean in the context of Gen 48:14—invoking dubious potential cognates from Arabic
or Akkadian meaning to “plait/weave together,” and then assuming a development along
the lines of “plait together-combine-have insight,” etc. Klaus Koenen, “śākal,” TDOT 14
(2004): 112–28, esp. 113.
84. But compare to Saul in terms of ambiguity, as explored in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.
95
Heroic Bodies in Judges
Torn Bodies, Torn Nations

In her study Natural Symbols, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued
that “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived.”
The two bodies cannot help but be connected, and the body becomes “a
highly restricted medium of expression. The forms it adopts in movement
and repose express social pressures in manifold ways.”1 Bodily forms and
social forms communicate directly. Obsession with bodily holes and open-
ings conveys social hopes and fears around exit, invasion, and so on,2 and
the two bodies, the self and the society, can be more or less near to one
another—the tension between the bodies conveys profound meaning.3 In
this chapter, I want to read the images of heroic bodies in the book of
Judges with Douglas’s comments in mind, demonstrating that the ambig-
uous and severed bodies in the book serve not merely as comic grotesquery
but rather as dire communicators of social disorder and political strife.
Consider the ending to Judges: the body comes directly into the
reader’s view as the dismemberment of a woman communicates the dis-
memberment of Israel (Judges 19–21). The political “body” of the nation
wars against itself on the largest scale, and the rejection of the tribe of
Benjamin threatens to tear the family apart. The haunting refrain that
echoes throughout and organizes these final chapters, “In those days,
there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes”
1. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, with a new introduction
(London: Routledge, 1996; originally published by Barrie & Rockliff, 1970), 69.
06
(17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25) is telling, too, for its bodily resonance—though
common enough as a body part and broad metaphor for judgment in the
Bible, the eyes take on a deep, specific resonance in the narrative sequence
established in the Torah. The connection among the eyes, desire, knowledge,
and judgment forms the central dramatic thread in Eve’s encounter with
the Serpent in Gen 3:5–7, and reference to the eyes for observing God’s
acts of deliverance and the promises or trials that await Israel in the land
appears repeatedly and with intensification throughout Deuteronomy.4
Given the fact that, as many have recognized, Judges participates in a
deeply Deuteronomic frame of reference (especially in Judges 1–3),5 a call-
back to eyes at the end of Judges becomes especially noteworthy as part
of that frame.6 Moreover, twice in Judges (16:21, 28), in the narrative of
the last judge before the book’s violent finale, Samson’s eyes re-enact the
4. E.g., Deut 1:30; 3:21; 4:9, 34; 6:22; 7:19; 9:17; 10:21; 11:7; 28:31–34; 28:65–67; 29:2–4; 34:4.
5. The classic foundational study positing a “Deuteronomistic” idea is Martin Noth, The
Deuteronomistic History, trans. J. Doull, J. Barton, M. D. Rutter, and D. R. Ap-Thomas
(Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981; an edition of this book was first published in German in 1943),
with elaborations concerning Judges by, e.g., Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The
Hebrew Bible and History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; orig-
inally published in 1988 by Harper & Row), esp. 37–143, and Robert Polzin, Moses and the
Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History. Part One: Deuteronomy, Joshua,
Judges (New York: Seabury, 1980). Against the notion that Judges has a “Deuteronomistic”
frame, cf. Frederick E. Greenspahn, “The Theology of the Framework of Judges,” VT
36.4 (1986): 385–96. Others have emended or challenged Noth’s original concept of a
“Deuteronomist” more generally, positing various editions to the text; e.g., Frank M. Cross,
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 274–90, and a review of many positions and a new
proposal of successive editions in Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A
Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2006). For
a recent attempt to see an important part of the book’s frame in a historical context (of the
post-exilic period), see Cynthia Edenburg, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose
of Judges 19–21 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016).
Major recent commentaries on Judges invariably mention issues of authorship and redac-
tion, as well as issues relevant to a literary reading and interpretation affecting our reading of
bodies; works I rely on in this regard include Jack M. Sasson, Judges 1–12, A New Translation
with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Susan
Niditch, Judges: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Victor
H. Matthews, Judges and Ruth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); J. Alberto
Soggin, Judges: A Commentary, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1981); Robert G. Boling, Judges, Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1975).
6. Also noticed by Andrew D. H. Mayes, “Deuteronomistic Royal Ideology in Judges 17–21,”
BI 9.3 (2001): 241–58, here 255, though Mayes opts to connect the references to “eyes” with
a specific phrase popular in Deuteronomy and Kings, “to do what is right in the eyes of
YHWH” (Deut 6:18; 12:29; 13:19; 1 Kgs 5:11; 22:43; 2 Kgs 12:3; 14:3, etc.).
61
Heroic Bodies in Judges 61
grand cyclical fate of Israel in Judges (sin and oppression—return to the

Lord—deliverance): a nearby enemy nation (the Philistines) gouges them
out, and Samson becomes a prisoner, but he regains strength, cries out
to the Lord, and smites the enemy as payback for the eye-gouging (Judg
16:21, 28).
Indeed, dismembered bodies bookend the narrative (Judges 1 and 19),
as do references to left-handedness (in Judges 3 and 20); these features are
not coincidences of narration but rather must indicate something of the
design of the book in terms of its many bodies and how they function as
Israel’s story. Thus, the co-appearance of significant and described heroic
bodies throughout the book, with the nascent group poised on the edge of
various forms of political control and complete anarchy, bears consider-
able weight for our investigation. As ciphers loaded down with meaning
for the corporate body, the bodies of national leaders mean quite a lot.
Enrst Kantorowicz’s seminal 1957 study of medieval political theology, The
King’s Two Bodies, highlighted the way bodily mysticism surrounding the
leader could encode political values and was fruitfully evoked at key points
in Mark Hamilton’s work on the king’s body in ancient Israel.7 In brief,
Kantorowicz analyzes those who considered the king to have two “bodies,”
one natural and temporal, subject to death and change, and one immortal,
a kind of super-body that represents the eternal order of the state and the
spirit of the people. The concept is of course overwhelmingly theological,
even going so far as to consider the body of the king as an angel (the char-
acter angelicus),8 and makes a clear analogy with the Christian conception
of Christ’s two natures (human and divine) as well as the related concept
of the church itself (a temporal body of believers on earth and an eternal,
7. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, with
a new Preface by William Chester Jordan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997;
originally published in 1957); Mark Hamilton’s The Body Royal: The Social Poetics of Kingship
in Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2005) takes up Kantorowicz’s categories at key points in crea-
tive ways, and it was through Hamilton’s work that I encountered the “two bodies” concept.
Kantorowicz’s work has also been taken up as a model for thinking about kingship in an-
cient Israel by Otto Loretz in Götter—Ahnen—Könige als gerechte Richter: Der “Rechtsfall” des
Menschen vor Gott nach altorientalischen und biblischen Texten (Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2003)
as well as Dale Launderville, Piety and Politics: The Dynamics of Royal Authority in Homeric
Greece, Biblical Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2003),  101–2.
8. Kantorowicz, Two Bodies, 8.
26
trans-temporal family wedded to Christ). 9 The appropriation of this con-

cept for thinking about politics in ancient Israel is quite natural, different
though medieval England was from the ancient Near East, because in the
Hebrew Bible we read of leaders who are at once fallible and temporal but
whose existence embodies and ensures something much larger for the na-
tion (e.g., Moses, David, the Judges). To be sure, the tension between that
fallibility (the “normal body”) and aspects of divine election and the iden-
tity of Israel before God (the “super-body”) is one of the more compelling
aspects of the narrative we find in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps even serving,
as Robert Alter has argued, as its most defining characteristic.10
On another level, as a metaphor for the politics of a community writ large,
the “body” image can for work for an entire nation and not only its leader.
The leader and the nation are fused in the notion of the king’s “two bodies,”
and in the previous chapter we saw the sometimes deft, sometimes blunt
ways the narrative identified “Israel” with the body of its ancestor Jacob. As
a direct metaphor for the entire community, the body forges a hierarchy and
a unity in a manner more frank than the “family” metaphor: members of
unequal status and function share in a larger identity, and conflicts could
even be seen as impossible by definition within the body image—the head
does all of the decision making, and the other parts follow along.11 In the
family metaphor, also primary for Israel (especially in the Torah), aggressive
political engagement within the community becomes ideologically possible
since families consist of separate, diverse members.12 My contention about
the importance of the body here for the book of Judges does not discount the
prevalence of other social metaphors, such as the family, because in fact the
meanings of families and bodies cross over and implicate one another.
Though reference to the body appears in some scholarly consid-
erations of Judges, few studies are devoted to a comprehensive view of
9. Consider also the community-as-body metaphors in the Pauline corpus, e.g., Rom 12:1–8;
1 Cor 12:12–31.
10. Robert Alter, “Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction,” PT 1.3 (1980): 143–62,
here 151. Here Alter speaks not of the king or the body but rather, more generally, of the “an-
titheses of divine plan and the sundry disorders of human performance in history.”
11. Erik Ringmar, “Metaphors of Social Order,” in Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting
and Changing the World, ed. Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo (London: Routledge, 2008), 57–
68, here 59.
12. Ringmar, “Metaphors,” 60–61.
6
3
bodily phenomena in this book.13 Occasionally, interpreters have noticed

the great significance of bodies in Judges and attempted to make some
sense of their frequent or loaded appearance. Here are several examples:
Mieke Bal has analyzed the speaking body, the speaking mouth, as
“body language” in Judges, considering speech-act theory as “a materialist
theory,” and arguing that “no speaker shows this inextricable mixture of
language and body better than the gibbor, the hero of the Book of Judges
who either speaks and then acts upon his words, or, in contrast, acts and
then speaks upon his actions.”14 The attitude toward the body in Judges,
whether the body be dismembered, long-haired, or overweight, could be
read as epiphenomenal to the book’s preoccupation with violence. In Bal’s
reading, for example, it is particularly murder that takes center stage15—the
grisly details of these murders then produce attendant bodily descriptions
in the narrative.
However, narrations of murder need not mention features unneces-
sary for the depiction of gore, such as left-handedness, hair length, and
so on. In a study analyzing Judges more along the lines of “esoteric” the-
ological cues rather than history, Robin Baker examines many aspects of
riddles, dreams, symbols, and illusions throughout the book.16 One aspect
of Judges’ coded presentation, in this reading, involves the pairing of body
parts. Indeed, Baker claims, the motif of pairs is “one of the books’ most
characteristic traits throughout.”17 The paired body parts begin immedi-
ately, with Adoni-bezek’s hands and feet/fingers and toes, and the book
ends with a series of inclusios referencing the (dual) “eyes” in c hapters 17–
21 (“everyone did what was right in his own eyes”).18 Another recent
13. But see the brief commentary on the terms of disability and bodies in Judges by Jeremy
Schipper, “Joshua–Second Kings,” in The Bible and Disability: A Commentary, ed. Sarah J.
Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, and Amos Yong (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017),
93–119, here 98–102.
14. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 132.
15. “The Book of Judges is about death. . . . The book is full of murder. . . . It openly celebrates
murder.” Bal, Death, 1.
16. Robin Baker, Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes and Otherness in the Book of
Judges (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
17. Baker, Hollow, 58. See also Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing, trans.
Jonathan Chipman (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 54–56, to which Baker also refers. Amit (p. 56) sug-
gests that the doubling motif may show the fixity of events (e.g., Gen 41:32).
18. Baker, Hollow, 59.
46
contribution, by Karolien Vermeulen, offers a nuanced look at the way the

literary use of body parts invites reflection on spatial dynamics (both sym-
bolically and literally, as words on the page).19 Vermeulen reads Judges 4–5
in terms of the way these chapters employ body parts and create bodily-
spatial dynamics of all kinds, and concludes that the prose account in
Judges 4 “shows the potential of the body-part device, whereas the song
[Judges 5] fully realizes that potential—that is, the potential to use space as
a rubric in both story building and story decoding.”20
In a rich essay, Suzie Park sees the references to left-handed Benjamites
in Judg 3:15 and 20:16 as both symbolic (the left hand representing that
which is sinister, nocturnal, hidden intentions, etc.) and literally tactical
(left-handers may have direct fighting advantages in a battle situation).21
Her analysis suggests that through these passages in Judges, we are to
think of the failed monarchy of Saul—first divinely guided and chosen by
God (as the Benjamite Ehud in Judges 3) but then fallen into a state of deg-
radation and loss (as the Benjamites in Judges 19–21).
Before turning to my own analysis of the texts, I want to say something
about the historical circumstances that produced the book of Judges and
the status of Judges’ central actors as “heroic” figures. If the book bears a
“Deuteronomistic” frame, and if that frame can only have been completed
in the aftermath of 586 bce, then it stands to reason that the first “com-
plete” book of Judges cannot be earlier than the sixth or perhaps even fifth
or fourth century. Dates that creep much later than the sixth–fifth cen-
turies bce, however, run into problems insofar as the Hebrew language
of the late Persian and Hellenistic periods bears distinct characteristics
on which most philologists would agree (and Judges does not, by and
large, contain those characteristics).22 Moreover, parts of Judges—most fa-
mously the “Song of Deborah” in c hapter 5—contain odd vocabulary and
19. Karolien Vermeulen, “Hands, Heads, and Feet: Body Parts as Poetic Device in Judges
4–5,” JBL 136.4 (2017): 810–19.
20. Vermeulen, “Hands,” 819 (italics hers).
21. Suzie Park, “Left-Handed Benjamites and the Shadow of Saul,” JBL 134.4 (2015): 701–20;
with overlap on some of these same issues, see Benjamin D. Giffone, “‘Special Forces’: A
Stereotype of Benjaminite Soldiers in the Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles,” SJOT
30.1 (2016): 16–29.
22. The question of whether the Hebrew language can be accurately dated on its own terms
has been fiercely debated over the last decade and I have no hope of meaningfully addressing
the issue here. I do, however, affirm the basic position and methodology of Na’ama Pat-El
and Aren Wilson-Wright, “Features of Archaic Biblical Hebrew and the Linguistic Dating
Debate,” HS 54 (2013): 387–410, with comments on Judges 5 specifically on pp. 400–402,
6
5
phrases that seem out of step with the basic style of classical Hebrew prose
(much of which probably felt quite at home to Hebrew speakers of the
ninth–sixth centuries bce). The Song’s relationship to very ancient ideas
and style betrays either a strident attempt to mimic the setting of a very old
world (archaizing) or the genuine mark of that old world.23 Some aspects
of the political situation of leadership, banditry, and rebellion in Judges
may even reflect, at a distance of some centuries, echoes of the period of
habiru activity during the second half of the second millennium bce.24
Reading Judges as “heroic” literature has become common enough in
scholarly analysis and needs little defense; the Judges are all clearly na-
tional leaders and lead the people in military activity to deliver Israel from
foreign oppressors. 25 Moreover, the Judges are “founding figures” in the
sense that they belong to an early world in terms of the biblical story-
line, and their actions continue the establishment of the nation in a period
that Israelites living during the later monarchy (say, in the eighth–sixth
centuries bce) would have considered “ancient.” Several studies in recent
years take up Judges explicitly on the terms of heroes and war poetry, such
as Mark Smith’s Poetic Heroes (2014), Charles Echols’s “Tell Me, O Muse”
(2008), and Gregory Mobley’s The Empty Men (2005).26 Because in Judges
we have war stories in their most direct, gory instantiations within the
Hebrew Bible, these stories are thus also some of the most corporeally sig-
nificant and offer numerous reflections on the meaning of the heroic body.
and Mark S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture
in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 211–33.
23. For the classic study, see Frank M. Cross and David N. Freedman, Studies in Ancient
Yahwistic Poetry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997; originally published in 1975 by the
Society of Biblical Literature).
24. Brian R. Doak, “‘Some Worthless and Reckless Fellows’: Landlessness and Parasocial
Leadership in Judges,” JHS 11.2 (2011): 1–29.
25. See, e.g., Jacob L. Wright, “Military Valor and Kingship: A Book-Oriented Approach to
the Study of a Major War Theme,” in Writing and Reading War: Rhetoric, Gender, and Ethics in
Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed. Brad E. Kelle and Frank Ritchel Ames (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2008), 33–56, here 44–46, who discusses both Gideon and Jephthah as
figures at the intersection of leadership and military action.
26. Smith, Poetic Heroes, esp. 234–66 on Judges; Charles L. Echols, “Tell Me, O Muse”: The Song
of Deborah (Judges 5) in the Light of Heroic Poetry (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), esp. 135–64;
Gregory Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel (New York: Doubleday,
2005), passim.
66
Heroic Bodies in Judges

In the rest of this chapter, I analyze a series of heroic body moments in
Judges (ad seriatim in the narrative)—Adoni Bezek in Judges 1, Ehud and
Eglon in Judges 3, Deborah and Jael in Judges 4–5, Samson in Judges 13–
16—and then conclude by again considering the dismembered concubine
and resulting chaos in Judges 19–20. Though these bodies often evoke
layers of ambiguity, their ability to tell the basic story of Israel’s sociopolit-
ical fracture in the pre-monarchic period is both clear and stunning.
Judges 1:1–7: Adoni-Bezek’s Dismembered Body

The story of heroic bodies begins early in Judges, in a gruesome way. The
brothers Judah and Simeon defeat the Canaanites and Perizzites to begin
taking land for settlement—land that apparently could have and should
have already been claimed during the previous generation’s experience
with Joshua—and take their leader, Adoni-Bezek (“Lord of Bezek”27) into
custody:
(v. 6) Adoni-Bezek fled, and they chased after him and caught him—
they cut off his thumbs and big toes. (7) Adoni-Bezek said: “Seventy
kings with thumbs and big toes cut off gathered up scraps beneath
my table! According to what I have done, God paid it back to me.”
They brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. (Judg 1:6–7)
Why begin Judges here, exactly, with a story like this? Granted, we do not
want to be naïve about our modern division into “books,” and the begin-
ning of Judges in 1:1, “after the death of Joshua,” has a natural link to the
preceding narrative of Joshua.28 Still, the Judges narrative takes a signifi-
cant departure from the tone and plot of Joshua in key respects and there
is something striking about the division occurring exactly here, with this
story, which now serves as the introduction to a new phase of Israel’s ex-
perience in the land.
27. The name may be a title rather than a personal name; Sasson, Judges 1–12, 130–31.
28. The link between Joshua and Judges in this respect has been debated in various ways;
see, e.g., Marvin A. Sweeney, “Davidic Polemics in the Book of Judges,” VT 47.4 (1997): 517–
29, esp. 518–19.
6
7
Beginning the book with a mutilated leader’s body strikes a note very
particular to Judges. Yairah Amit defines the “hero” in Judges (or indeed
any literary text) as “the center of interest of the work,” defined by fea-
tures such as the amount of space devoted to particular characters, ap-
pearance in key moments (beginnings and endings), and the relationship
of a character to key themes in the work as a whole.29 Certainly characters
who occupy many chapters, like Gideon and Samson, are “heroic” in all
of Amit’s senses (in addition to their identity as military figures, leaders,
and founding figures), but Amit’s suggestion that characters in “strong
places of the work,” that is, beginnings and endings,30 appropriately points
attention to Judges’ beginning and ending and the bodily themes present
in both places: the book ends with the dismembered body of the Levite’s
concubine.
The episode comes off as all the more striking and even strange for
two of its details: the severing of the thumbs and toes, not at all neces-
sary for a basic plot overview of land acquisition (compare, e.g., with the
summary reports of battle and taking land in Josh 10:28–43), and Adoni-
Bezek’s bitter soliloquy, referring to his own acts of dismembering other
kings, advances the plot in no clear or immediate way. Because often the
claim about bodies and physical detail in biblical narrative is that these
features are not mentioned unless they play some obvious role in the plot,31
the seemingly gratuitous references here warrant reflection. Of course,
the “plot payoff” for bodily feature reference may not be immediate for
explaining action in a particular story (as we see it will be with Ehud in
Judges 3), so we may need a broader view of the body’s possibilities in this
account.
The practice of bodily amputation and mutilation as either threat
or practice appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and in various texts
and iconography throughout the broader ancient Near Eastern and
Mediterranean world.32 As a biblical theme, dismemberment can often
29. Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Leiden: Brill,
1999), 214–15.
30. Amit, Art of Editing, 214.
31. See comments in Chapter 1 of this book on this issue.
32. For the Hebrew Bible, see discussion and examples in Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the
Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 38–45, and Debra Scoggins Ballentine, “What Ends Might Ritual Violence
Accomplish? The Case of Rechab and Baanah in 2 Samuel 4,” in Ritual Violence in the
Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives, ed. Saul M. Olyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
86
be read as some form of “ritual violence”—that is to say, following the

analysis of Debra Scoggins Ballentine, the violence is a creative, strategic
action, meant to use “physical separation and movement away from an
idealized state, primarily wholeness” in order to create meaning.33 The
closest biblical parallel to Judg 1:6–7, in 1 Samuel 4, involves severing the
hands and feet of Rechab and Baanah, men who tried to do David a favor
by decapitating David’s political enemy, Eshbaal, an act that occurs after
death (thus it is a corpse mutilation, not an amputation). Disfiguring the
hands (or specifically the palm of the hand [kaph]?) appears as a legal threat
in Deut 25:11–12 as well as for a statue of a deity (Dagon) in 1 Sam 5:4.
Outside of the dismembered concubine in Judges 19, the specter of decap-
itation appears again in Judg 7:25 for two Midian chiefs (the narrator does
not describe the cutting action, only the resultant transfer of the heads;
for other beheadings, see, e.g., 1 Sam 5:4, 17:51, 31:9; 2 Sam 4:5–7, 10:6–8,
20:22; 2 Kgs 10:6–8). The intense military and political activity in Judges
as well as 1–2 Samuel apparently requires stories of this kind, wherein en-
emies are defeated and humiliated in stark bodily terms.
In the case of Judges 1, the removal of Adoni-Bezek’s thumbs and
big toes has a direct physical consequence, which prevents grasping of
weapons or easily advancing on foot for war, but also inflicts on him the
punishment he had inflicted upon others—that is, upon the seventy kings
9–26, especially the helpful chart on pp. 14–16 upon which I rely in review of comparable
cases (to this chart, add also the severed or transported heads in Judg 7:25 and 2 Kgs 10:6–8).
In the broader ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world: Assyrian inscriptions and
reliefs frequently depict bodily mutilations; examples in Christopher B. Hays, Death in the
Iron Age II and in First Isaiah (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 14–15, and Olyan, Disability,
40, as well as a broader treatment by Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence
in Mesopotamia (New York: Zone Books, 2008), e.g., 132–33, and Seth Richardson, “Death
and Dismemberment in Mesopotamia: Discorporation between the Body and Body Politic,”
in Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and
Mediterranean, ed. Nicola Laneri (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2007), 189–208. Corpse mu-
tilation prominently occurs in the Iliad—see Charles Segal, The Theme of Mutilation of the
Corpse in the Iliad (Leiden: Brill, 1971), who sees mutilation as crucial to the epic, and Jean-
Pierre Vernant, “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,” in Mortals
and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 50–74, esp. 71 on dismemberment and 67, where Vernant speaks of mutila-
tion as the “corollary,” the “sinister obverse” of the “beautiful” heroic death. Corpse mutila-
tion played a systematic role in Greek warfare practice according to Xenophon; W. Kendrick
Pritchett, The Greek State at War, Part IV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
32 n. 98.
33. Ballentine, “What Ends,” 10, 12; these comments serve her reading of the murder of
Eshbaal in 2 Samuel 4, but her analysis has many applications for our present text.
96
relegated to dog-status beneath his table.34 In one of the more attentive

treatments of this passage—not many commentators address the Adoni-
Bezek episode in detail35—Tracy Lemos analyzes shame and mutilation in
several texts, suggesting, among other things, that mutilation can signal “a
newly established power dynamic between the victim and the aggressor.”36
Relevant for Adoni-Bezek’s situation, the sudden reversal of a dynamic
explains both the treatment of the victim (once a lord of his city, now de-
based and defeated) and the debasement of the victim in terms of his past
treatment of others (he had cut off the thumbs and toes of those under
his table). Lemos instructively points to the animalizing effect of Adoni-
Bezek’s past actions on two levels: placing other kings under his table
relegates them to the position of scrap-gathering dogs, and removing the
digits of hands and feet needed for grasping de-humanizes his physical
ability.37 This animalizing imagery appears in treaty passages from else-
where in the Bible (e.g., Jer 34:18–20, and implicit in Genesis 15) and the
broader ancient Near Eastern world (e.g., neo-Assyrian treaties, the Sefire
inscriptions, etc.).38
Other aspects of the story remain unclear. As so often in the Hebrew
Bible, sparseness of narrative detail allows readers to fill in a richer back-
ground context: Did the Israelite victors punish Adoni-Bezek in this way
specifically to humiliate him in light of what they knew he had done to
others? Or is the punishment a type of karma, unknown even to his pun-
ishers, a result built in to the moral structure of the universe?39 And as the
episode closes, should we understand Adoni-Bezek’s death in Jerusalem
as a result of these injuries, or as a much later event, after years as prisoner
34. Sasson, Judges 1–12, 132, also reads the mutilation symbolically: the reference to the to-
tality evoking-number seventy kings he mutilated symbolizes “Adoni-bezeq’s sense that he
once had control of his whole world.” On this, see also Boling, Judges, 55.
35. Sasson, Judges 1–12, 130–34, is a notable exception.
36. Tracy M. Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 125.2
(2006): 225–41, quote here from 225–26, and the treatment of Adoni-Bezek at 236–39.
37. Lemos, “Shame,” 237.
38. Besides these examples (she does not cite Genesis 15 in her essay), Lemos (“Shame,”
238) mentions passages where authors treat human bodies flung upon the ground as if they
were animal carrion, e.g., Deut 28:26 and Jer 7:33, beyond the reference in Jer 34:20.
39. I have in mind here the famous essay of Klaus Koch, “Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma
im Alten Testament?” ZTK 52 (1955): 1–42. Certainly, kind-for-kind payback is a natural part
of biblical law (e.g., the lex talionis) as well as many narrative and prophetic schemes in the
Hebrew Bible (see Sasson, Judges 1–12, 133, appropriately against the view that retribution is
somehow a “Canaanite” practice rather than Israelite).
07
of war? Perhaps the simplest narrative sense would assume Adoni-Bezek’s

punishment as a direct (even divine) consequence of his past actions (not
a calculated limb-for-limb payback on the part of his Israelite pursuers)
and that he dies of the injury relatively soon after his imprisonment in
Jerusalem. As Jack Sasson suggests, the Israelite act of transporting their
newly mutilated prisoner offers a chance to promenade his defeated body
before the public in Jerusalem (a city taken in Judg 1:8; compare with the
treatment of Samson’s mutilated body in Judg 16:21, and Saul’s mutilated
body in 1 Sam 31:9–10).
Already in this first chapter of Judges, then, the body inscribes an im-
portant theme of reciprocal transgression and punishment, both against
national enemies and within one’s own self.40 Israelites inscribe humilia-
tion and defeat upon the body. Moreover, bodies connect with and evoke
other bodies. Significantly, the locale Bezek appears elsewhere in the Bible
only in 1 Sam 11:1–11 (specifically in v. 8)—in an episode where charac-
ters threaten mutilation and symbolically enact bodily dismemberment
through an animal. In this text, Saul makes his first appearance as a for-
midable heroic actor; the “spirit of God” (ruach elohim) rushes over him
(compare with the phrase “spirit of YHWH” coming over the Judges in
Judg 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 13:25, 14:6, 14:19, 15:14), prompting Saul to cut up an
animal into pieces and send them throughout all Israel. The sequence
of verbs and locations here uncannily matches that of Judg 19:29 (take,
cut, send, territory, Israel, Jabesh/Gilead, Gibeah [lachach, natach, shalach,
gebul yisrael, gilead, gibeah]), strongly suggesting an intentional connec-
tion.41 Thus, the book of Judges already begins to bristle with reference to
Saulide texts and Saul’s own body.
Judges 3:15–30: Ehud the Left-Hander,

Eglon the Fat King
The first detailed account of a “Judge”—the text actually calls him a moshia,
“Deliverer” (Judg 3:15)42—that of Ehud in Judges 3, directly employs the
40. Niditch, Judges,  39–40.

41. As others have noticed, e.g., Park, “Left-Handed,” esp. 716–19. As Park notes, most of the
Saul-Judges correlations come in the later chapters of Judges, though we should add the ref-
erence to Bezek here as another gesture in this direction.
42. Only Ehud and Othniel (Judg 3:9) receive this title “Deliverer” (moshia) in Judges. The
fact that Ehud is not labeled a “Judge” (shophet) directly may not mean very much, however,
given the fact that after calling him a moshia, the narrator uses the verb “judged” (shaphat)
71
imagery of the body as its central narrative engine, even to comedic effect.
Two bodily issues stand out: Ehud’s left-handedness, and Eglon’s large
body size.
Early in the biblical storyline, we learn already in Genesis 48 of asso-
ciations related to the right hand (for blessing) and then its opposite or
negation, the left hand.43 Jacob’s criss-crossed blessing of Ephraim and
Manasseh does not, however, put Manasseh, on the left, in a position of
“curse”—only Ephraim in a position of eminence, on the right. Perhaps
it is inevitable, invoking a basic structuralist interpretation, that in a du-
ality like right-left the side not attributed to blessing can only be a “curse,”
but perhaps the system does not always have to be so rigid or two-sided.44
Nevertheless, it most often is; Mesopotamian omen texts invoke concepts
of right and left as favorable and unfavorable, respectively, and the right or
left movement of omens (e.g., birds) finds poetic expression throughout
the Iliad and quite a lot of other literature.45 As a bodily symbol, the right-
left divide in terms of hands is possibly the most common, natural, and
pervasive distinction available to humans— currently scientists seem
to agree the predominance of right-handedness is genetic46—and since
for Othniel directly after calling him a moshia (Judg 3:10). Admittedly, Ehud is never called a
“judge” and never “judges.”
43. See discussion of this episode in Chapter 2 of this book; for a thorough review of right
and left hand in the Bible, see Park, “Left-Handed Benjamites,” 705–7.
44. Consider, on analogy, the concept of being “chosen” or “elect” in the Hebrew Bible—the
simple opposite would be “un-chosen,” “doomed,” etc., but this two-sided opposition does
not adequately describe the full spectrum of how biblical authors deal with this situation
(following Joel S. Kaminsky, “Did Election Imply the Mistreatment of Non-Israelites?” HTR
96.4 [2003]: 397–425). Recent scholarship on the Ehud narrative struggles with the question
of whether the story as a whole or Ehud individually are to be viewed positively or negatively,
either by contemporary readers or at the level of the narrative as satire; see the review by
Kelly J. Murphy, “Judges in Recent Research,” CBR 15.2 (2017): 179–213, here 181–82.
45. E.g., for Mesopotamian omens, see Nils P. Heeßel, “The Hermeneutics of Mesopotamian
Extispicy: Theory vs. Practice,” in Mediating between Heaven and Earth: Communication with
the Divine in the Ancient Near East, ed. C. L. Crouch, Jonathan Stökl, and Anna Elise Zernecke
(London: T & T Clark, 2012), 16–35, esp. 21–25; for right/left in the bird omens of the Iliad,
see Matthew Dillon, Omens and Oracles: Divination in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge,
2017), 150– 53. In fact, the shared right/ left elements of omen hermeneutics between
Mesopotamia and Greece are not only predicated on universal aspects of the right/left issue
but rather stem from shared and borrowed cultic traditions (probably first originating in
Mesopotamia); see William Furley and Victor Gysembergh, Reading the Liver: Papyrological
Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 77–95.
46. E.g., Sebastian Ocklenburg et al., “Epigenetic Regulation of Lateralized Fetal Spinal Gene
Expression Underlies Hemispheric Asymmetries,” eLife (2017); DOI: 10.7554/eLife.22784.
27
the 1909 essay of Robert Hertz on the cultural implications of right and
left, many have studied the (resoundingly similar) ways, cross-culturally,
groups have used the right-left symbolic grid.47
In the case of Ehud, quite differently from the strongly dichotomized
symbolic values otherwise suggested by the right-left divide, his lefty status
evokes both positive and negative values and ultimately positions him be-
yond clear moral judgment in the narrative. Oddly, the Hebrew narrator
does not describe his left-handedness the way translators in English most
often render it, simply as “left-handed.” Rather, Judg 3:15 calls Ehud an ish
itter yad-yemino, “a man bound on the right(-hand),” instead of invoking
the more common biblical term for “left,” semol (śĕmō’l).48 Indeed, the
usual term for left-handedness appears later within the Ehud story, in
3:21: “Ehud reached with his left hand (yad śĕmō’lô) and took . . .” Since
the qittēl noun pattern for itter (‘iṭṭēr) (“bound”) can denote a disability—
compare, e.g., ‘iwwēr (“blind”), pissēaḥ (“lame”), ‘illēm (“mute”)49—the
text may suggest some problem with Ehud’s right hand. However, this
explanation falters when compared with the only other appearance of the
phrase itter yad-yemino in the Bible, also in Judges (20:16); here, seven
hundred Benjamites, selected fighters, an elite force, could “sling a stone
at a hair and not miss”—all of them “bound on the right hand.”50 As Park
plausibly argues, we should consider these fighters trained to use their left
hand for strategic purposes, perhaps even (as in documented cases) by
physically constraining the right hand so as to force dexterity with the left
hand.51 Moreover, even before Ehud is quickly introduced as one “bound
on the right(-hand),” he is called a “Benjamite”—literally, a “Son of the
47. Robert Hertz, “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity,”
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3.2 (2013; reprint): 335–57; Park, “Left-
Handed
Benjamites,” 704– 5, reviews some key studies and concepts, as does Halpern, First
Historians,  40–43.
48. Compare to the terminology for the left-handed slingers in 1 Chr 12:2, maśmi’lîm (hiphil
participle), “those turning to the left; left-handers,” etc., or in Gen 48:14, śĕmō’lô, “his left
(hand).”
49. Jeremy Schipper, Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the
David Story (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 65–70.
50. See discussion later in the chapter on the left-handed slingers in Judges 20. Note also a
passing reference to the left hand in Judg 7:20, where Gideon’s army hold torches in their
left hands (beyad-shemolam) and trumpets in their right hands.
51. Park, “Left-Handed Benjamites,” 701–2; also Halpern, First Historians, 41. The normal
term for left hand (as opposed to ‘ittēr yad-yĕmînô) in Judg 3:21 does not, on its own, offer
a clear indication of how ‘ittēr functions in this exact context, however (Schipper, Disability
Studies, 66 n. 11, hints at this idea). Rather, the literary flow of the story and sense of the
73
Right (Side/Hand),” giving us an odd juxtaposition. We must therefore

prepare ourselves for an unconventional, complicated body.
Ehud’s body thus signals unexpected advantages for his cause and unex-
pected problems for the enemy. Moreover, his left-handed feature collides
with another body—a “very fat” one, belonging to Eglon, king of Moab.
Although themes of obesity and fatness appear scattered throughout the
Bible, only one individual other than Eglon seems to be described as par-
ticularly fat or heavy, namely, Eli the priest in 1 Sam 4:18, making this fea-
ture quite notable if indeed we are correct to translate bari me’od as “very
fat” in Judg 3:17.52 Other than Eglon in Judges 3, one of the more vivid de-
pictions of this type appears in Moses’s farewell poem in Deut 32:15:
Jesharun [Israel] grew fat (šmn), and kicked; you grew fat (šmn), you
became thick (kbh), you gorged (kśh)—he abandoned the God who
made him, he disgraced the rock of his salvation.
The connection between gorging, weight, luxury, and the abandon-

ment of God comes up elsewhere, such as Jer 5:28, which connects the
satisfaction of one’s own belly with the deprivation of others (see also 1
Sam 2:29, and laws or warnings against gluttony in Deut 21:20; Prov 28:7;
Sir 31:20). As a metaphor used frequently in the Hebrew Bible for burdens,
sin, unrighteousness, anger, destruction, sickness, oppression, or sorrow,
“heaviness” carries with it decidedly negative tones.53 When the narrator of
1 Samuel describes Eli’s death, the bodily explanation for how or why he
falls and breaks his neck, “for he was heavy (kaved)” (1 Sam 4:18), arrives as
the culminating judgment after a series of chapters in which the priest’s
moral and spiritual failures abound: he is going blind, he fails to constrain
his wicked sons, and so on.
action require a simpler formulation in 3:21, rather than awkwardly stating, “Ehud reached
with his hand-other-than-the-one-bound-on-the-right-side . . .”
52. Few are described as “skinny,” either; see, e.g., the description of the lamenter in Ps
109:24, “my flesh is lacking in fat/health” (besari kachash mishamen). The most concentrated
description of bodies as “fat” or “thin” occurs in Genesis 41, as Joseph describes the cows in
Pharaoh’s dream as “thin” or “gaunt” (daqqot) and “fat” or “plump” (bari).
53. E.g., with the root kbd (heavy, weighty), see Exod 5:9; Deut 1:12; 1 Sam 5:6; 1 Kgs 12:4; Neh
5:15; Job 23:3; Ps 88:8(7); Prov 27:3; Eccl 6:1; Isa 24:20; Lam 3:7. See the analysis of the weight
metaphor with relation to sin in Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale
47
Thus, by his body we are encouraged to imagine Eglon as a decadent,

unrighteous monarch, made fat on the tribute of Israel. However, to com-
plicate this, in fact Eglon commits no obvious infraction—he oppresses
Israel, an act predicated on Israel’s own disobedience, thus directly making
Eglon God’s own agent (“YHWH strengthened Eglon . . .”; Judg 3:12).54
The name “Eglon” seems to be (comically and symbolically) modeled on
the Hebrew word egel, “calf,” marking him for his suitability for slaughter,
like a “fatted calf.”55 His body, through his name, morphs into an animal.
As Meir Sternberg suggests, even the sword has bodily features made
meaningful in light of Eglon’s “calf” identity; 56 in 3:16, Ehud crafts a blade
with “two mouths” (sheney peyot), mouths that will “swallow” the “calf.”
Though “mouth” (peh) is the common biblical idiom to speak of the “edge”
of the sword, this text is possibly the only one where the “mouth” associ-
ation portends action in the text. One comparison occurs in 2 Sam 11:25,
where David blithely remarks that the sword “devours (‘kl) one as well as
another,” a personification made painfully relevant to his own actions in
the parable of Nathan where the rich man devours the poor man’s lamb
(2 Sam 12:4). The size of Ehud’s sword, a cubit long (perhaps around 16–
18 inches//40–45 cm), comes off as rather small compared to how the
reader might imagine Eglon’s body. For all this, Sternberg goes on to sug-
gest that Eglon’s size “remains least projectable into action”57—that is to
54. Sasson, Judges 1–12, 249 also raises the problem of why this story satirizes (if indeed
it is “satire”) God’s chosen agent, Eglon; he concludes that the story leans more toward
“pride inspired by the dispatch of a brutal tyrant.” In a study of polysemy in this story,
Karolien Vermeulen, “The Intentional Use of Polysemy: A Case Study of [DBR STR] (JUDG
3:19),” in Approaches to Literary Readings of Ancient Jewish Writings, ed. Klaas Smelik and
Karolien Vermeulen (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 115–36, here 124, suggests that Ehud’s presentation
of tribute lures the king into a position of trust, thus marking him as “not the smartest guy
in town” in that he is “more interested in life’s little luxuries and unable to consider mes-
sages that address other issues, such as his own murder.” See also Lowell K. Handy, “Uneasy
Laughter: Ehud and Eglon as Ethnic Humor,” SJOT 6.2 (1992): 233–46, esp. 236–40, on
the trope of the shrewd Israelite versus the stupid and gullible foreigner, a motif of “ethnic
humor.”
55. Amit, Book of Judges, 184, also sees various cultic connotations—with the calf as either a
burnt offering or a cultic object of (illicit) worship in Exodus 32, Hos 8:6, etc. Robert Alter,
The Art of Biblical Narrative, revised and updated (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 45, suggests
the description for Eglon’s weight, bari (“fat”), evokes the sacrificial term for “fatling,” meri.
For the name, see Richard Hess, “Israelite Identity and Personal Names from the Book of
Judges,” HS 44 (2003): 25–39, here 34.
56. See Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama
of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 333, for some of the following.
57. Sternberg, Poetics, 334.
75
say, while Ehud’s left-handedness immediately suggests trickery and even

battle skill, what does Eglon’s fatness prepare us to expect?
When Ehud draws—with his left hand—the blade he had created par-
ticularly for this moment and stabs Eglon in his presumably giant belly,
the narrator offers one of the more gruesome moments of bodily prose in
the entire Bible: “The handle went in after the blade, and the fat closed in
after the blade, for he did not draw the sword out from his belly—and the
parshedon (filth? guts?) came out.” Some modern and ancient translations
simply omit the final phrase, either because they did not understand what
parshedon meant—or because they did.
In another corpus of war literature from the Mediterranean Iron Age,
the Iliad, abdominal wounds figure as one category of grisly battle scene.58
Homer does not shy away from describing wounds in bloody and even
surprising anatomical detail, though for all that the realism is a “fake re-
alism,” with various descriptions defying basic bodily or medical norms.59
One is reminded of the way contemporary action films strain bodily veri-
similitude in outrageous ways—for example, bit characters appear to get
“killed” by a quick punch or glancing blow, while others remain alive and
speaking, just long enough to offer a farewell death speech, despite having
their throats slashed. Though the belly wound plays a major role among
the war wounds of the Iliadic fighters, Homer does not offer anatomical
precision beyond designating the lower or middle abdomen. However, he
does describe the aftermath of the wound in grisly terms: guts splayed
out upon the ground, spears quivering, stuck in the entrails (see Iliad
4.525; 17.523; 20.418, 20.470; 21.180).60 The Hebrew Bible features several
other belly wounds, all in 2 Samuel, and all passing without further de-
tail beyond a warrior striking another in the belly (chomesh) and then the
death report: 2 Sam 2:23 (Abner skewers Asahel); 3:27 (Joab stabs Abner);
4:6 (Rechab and Baanah stab Ishbaal); 20:10 (Joab stabs Amasa).61 Aside
from the quick note about the spilling of the parshedon, Eglon too dies
58. See the comparisons on this front also in Lawson G. Stone, “Eglon’s Belly and Ehud’s
Blade: A Reconsideration,” JBL 128.4 (2009): 649–63, esp. 652–53, 657, 659; though I disa-
gree with the way he uses these sources, Stone makes a helpful move to turn to this literature
for comparisons.
59. Martin Mueller, The Iliad, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 81.
60. Mueller, Iliad, 82; see also Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle
in Classical Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 212.
61. Compare also Num 25:8 (qevah); in any of these cases, it is difficult to know if the chomesh,
qevah, or beten are exactly the “belly” or if the terminology more broadly indicates the torso.
67
quickly and wordlessly, just as a dispatched film enemy might die from a
single blow.
One additional bodily element in this story deserves attention at the basic
level of the narrative. Just before the violent attack, in 3:20: “Ehud came
to him [Eglon] as he sat in the upper roof chamber (aliyat hammeqerah),62
when he was by himself. And Ehud said, ‘A divine message from me to
you!’—and he rose from upon his throne.” How are we to understand
Eglon’s transition from sitting to standing? Is the “upper roof chamber” a
bathroom—and does Ehud steal into the room, unexpectedly, or had Eglon
invited him there? The laconic phrase “Ehud came to him” describes
nothing of an invitation, and the transition from v. 19, when Eglon ordered
“Silence!” and sent his attendants away, lacks a context explaining why
Ehud would have to “come to him” in the next verse. Perhaps we imagine
Eglon in a state of agitation, unready for the sudden announcement. But
had not Eglon invited Ehud into this exact setting, without attendants, pre-
cisely for such an announcement?63 Suggestions for Eglon’s rising range
from terror to plot necessity to excitement. Jack Sasson points to a rabbinic
tradition that even views Eglon’s posture change positively: “Because he
rose for God, he became the father of Ruth.”64
The meanings associated with Ehud’s left-handedness, Eglon’s weight,
and the blade-in-the-belly aftermath continually attract interpretive atten-
tion disproportionate to the story’s length or importance in the book of
Judges.65 The attention to bodies in the story drives this focus,66 and the
text continues to allow diverse interpretations precisely because readers
are not allowed an easy solution to the tone or multiple meanings of
the bodies and dialogue. Military adventure and humor lead the way, as
readers may delight in watching the secret assassination plot unfold, and
62. See the detailed archaeological treatment of this “upper room” in Halpern, First
Historians,  42–60.
63. See Matthews, Judges and Ruth, 62.
64. Sasson, Judges 1–12, 233 (citing Ruth Rabbah 2:9; bSanhedrin 60a; Numbers Rabbah 16:27).
65. For recent views, e.g., Sasson, Judges 1–12, 221–42, and Murphy, “Judges,” 181–82; Stone,
“Eglon’s Belly”; for earlier interpretations, see David M. Gunn, Judges through the Centuries
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 34–52, on a broad range of readings from ancient and medieval
all the way through the twentieth century.
66. Pace Sternberg, Poetics, 335, who suggests that the details of left-handedness and fatness
fall “below the threshold of plot relevance,” but rather find their meaning in the way the story
enacts “inferential drama,” i.e., the details create anticipation for the reader, and we see their
meaning acted out later.
7
the author employs scatological humor—Eglon’s bowels erupt, and his

attendants later wonder, behind a closed door, whether he is relieving him-
self (literally “covering his feet,” a euphemism for defecation; see also 1
Sam 24:3).67 Robert Alter even reads sexual overtones: the innuendo of the
common Hebrew idiom for intercourse, “enter into” (bo), in the narratively
gratuitous phrase of 3:20, “Ehud approached (bo) him . . . ,” followed by
the “hideously sexual” dagger thrust, enacted in a place of intimacy, where
the two are alone.68 Susan Niditch sees Eglon’s fat closing in over the blade
as “strongly vaginal,” the dagger’s placement on his thigh suggests the
“male erogenous zone,” and the sword itself acts as a phallus.69 The fact
that the narrative so clearly allows for this range of bodily symbols, even
if they cannot “prove” a sexualized reading of the story for every reader,
shows how deeply the story participates in the bodily collision of these two
characters.
Though at least one recent interpreter, Lawson Stone, has tried to sig-
nificantly downplay the element of Eglon’s obesity as a driving comic or
dramatic force in the narrative, suggesting instead that we read Eglon as a
healthy, even attractive, specimen,70 the plain sense of the text itself makes
67. Because of what the attendants say in 3:24, the scatological element here still holds,
though less obviously, even if one opts for a different translation choice for the parshedon
element (e.g., Boling, Judges, 86–87, “and he [Ehud] came out through the [parshedon],” i.e.,
an architectural feature: “there is no warrant for taking the word as referring to the vent of
the human body and reading the feminine noun, ḥereb, as subject of the masculine verb
way-yēṣē”).
68. Alter, Art, 45; cf. Stone’s protests, “Eglon’s Belly,” 654 n. 19.
69. Niditch, Judges, 58. She goes on to compare the imagery of defeat and rape present in
Homeric epic—“the enemy is unmanned in this way, feminized” (with reference to Emily
Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979], 101).
70. Stone, “Eglon’s Belly.” See also Sasson, Judges 1–12, 229, who translates bari me’od as “a
very imposing man,” while still acknowledging the animal and slaughter imagery (Sasson
suggests the moniker Eglon means “Calf-y”). Regarding Stone’s worthy challenge to the
dominant interpretation here, in addition to the relevant critique by Vermeulen, “Intentional
Use,” 123–24 n. 26, on the whole, I find at least as many unsupported assumptions in Stone’s
argument as in the arguments he critiques for their unsupported assumptions—e.g., on
p. 656, among other issues, the notion that no one like the fat Eglon “could” have become
king in Judges’ Iron Age I environment (how would we know this?). Stone even attempts
to subject the story to “realistic” medical analysis (“Eglon’s Belly,” 659), a direction taken
by others with similar assumptions of historicity in ancient literary description (e.g., M. M.
Manring et al., “Treatment of War Wounds: A Historical Review,” Clinical Orthopaedics and
Related Research 467.8 [2009]: 2168–91, esp. 2169 and 2173 regarding the Iliad), assuming
that the story somehow needs to be verified by, or subjected to analysis based on, knowledge
of the “real” situation in which Ehud and Eglon find themselves.
87
Eglon’s body in this respect fairly obvious: “Now Eglon was a very fat (bari
me’od) man” (Judg 3:17). In classical biblical Hebrew there would be many
clear ways to indicate Eglon’s status as “strong,” “robust,” “mighty,” and
so on, without any chance that one might think he is overweight; even
though, as Stone correctly suggests, the term bari on its own could denote
a situation of fleshed-out health, as opposed to obesity (e.g., the healthy
cows in Pharaoh’s dream interpreted by Joseph in Genesis 41 are bari),
the addition of the modifier me’od (very, extremely), bari me’od, along with
the odd detail about the sword enclosed entirely within the king’s belly (a
narrative detail Stone also contests, granted), tips the balance in favor of
the obesity reading. The king is fat. His corpulence focuses our attention
on aspects of the physical assassination (e.g., the king may not be agile
enough to defend himself, and his body encloses the blade so as to hide
the murder weapon) and symbolic layers relating to the king’s decadence
(e.g., the note about his status as bari me’od lies sandwiched between state-
ments about receiving tribute from Israel, and his name, “Calf,” marks
him as the object of a bloody slaughter).71
Considering all of this, we now need to ask about the larger meaning of
the bodies in this episode: Why tell a story like this, as the first example of
a “savior” in Judges? And what tone do the bodily references set compared
with the “heroic” situation of the narrative? Paired as they are, Ehud’s left-
handed body and Eglon’s fat body work together; they are not coincidental
but rather integrally linked, this much seems obvious, though the bodies
communicate a series of messages potentially jutting out in multiple dir-
ections based on the situation of reception and the grounds of analysis.
Ehud’s left hand immediately evokes the negative aspects of the right/
left binary, but the fact that he delivers Israel, and in such a shrewd and
winning manner, suggests a context in which most audiences—certainly,
I think, the ancient audience—will celebrate. (Negative overall appraisals
of Judges based on the overweening violence of the book must condemn
him, indeed, condemn the entire world depicted here with its bodies cut
71. Vermeulen, “Intentional Use,” 123 n. 25, argues that even if we see Eglon as a “healthy”
or “ideal” physical specimen, in Stone’s argument (“Eglon’s Calf,” 650–54), this would only
strengthen the imagery of the sacrifice, as Eglon becomes the “ideal sacrifice.” The question
of whether we are to see the description of the entire Moabite army in 3:29, kol-shamen, “all
[of them] hearty (or: fat?),” as somehow parallel to Eglon in this respect (so Alter, Art, 47) is
less clear to me, and here Stone’s argument (“Eglon’s Belly,” 651) is convincing—though
we are under no compulsion to see both Eglon and the army as “fat” or see them both as
“healthy, attractive,” etc.
97
and tossed around like garbage to serve all-too-temporary political ends.)

The meeting of the left-handed sword thrust with the bulging abdomen
pits hard against soft, devious against gullible, the tricks of the oppressed
cutting into the excesses of the oppressor. This seems to be the basic per-
spective of the narrative in this passage, in isolation. Due to the artful use
of polysemy in this story, however, we need not come to hard and fast de-
cisions about whether Eglon’s weight or Ehud’s actions are definitely on
either side of a “positive”/”negative” divide72—and by the end of the book
and its final acts of mutilation, we must be in a new position to reassess
the status of Judges’ bodies.
Through his comparison to passages depicting painful abdominal in-
jury in the Iliad, Stone makes the claim that because in the Iliad “these are
heroic, not shameful deaths!” and because a “narrator such as ours, writing
in the heroic tradition,” would never “glorify his heroes by asserting the
defeat of a flaccid, utterly ridiculous foe” (i.e., the fat Eglon), we cannot
see this text as “heroic” if we read Eglon as fat or naïve, or, presumably, if
we see Ehud as too devious, too awful.73 Though the comparison with the
Iliad is potentially illuminating, the perspective we gain through the com-
parison does not run in a straightforward line. In fact, the Iliad itself takes
a surprising turn regarding its violence and the status of heroism precisely
by asking us to weigh the virtue of forgiveness and the power of relenting
in the face of rage and gore. The value of the body as a disemboweled
scene of horror on the battlefield gives way, with increasing urgency as
the epic moves toward its finale, to battles over possession of the body by
way of honorable burial (versus corpse mutilation by the enemy; e.g., Iliad
22), all the way until the moving final scene where Achilles weeps with the
father (Priam) of his prized victim (Hector)—and the father of his victim
kisses the hand of his son’s killer (Iliad 24.560–61). The body, at the end
of the Iliad, encodes not only the precious human treasure of the besieged
city in the form of its staunchest defender, Hector, but also Achilles’s
72. See Vermeulen, “Intentional Use.”

73. Stone, “Eglon’s Belly,” 652–53. Vermeulen, 125, on the other hand, reads this story as anti-
heroic; see pp. 128–31 on various attempts to rehabilitate Ehud’s character or reconcile the
fact that he is Israel’s deliverer (in a positive sense) with the violence and perceived negative
aspects of the story.
08
own soon-to-die body, the relationship of Achilles to his own father (Iliad
24.570–600),74 and so much more of the human drama of the epic.
Thus, merely lifting some battle passage or another from the narrative
and declaring it “heroic” and then moving to a one-to-one comparison on
this front with Judges misses the broader context of heroic violence in both
stories and the broader frames of that violence, different as they are, as we
compare the stories. “Shame” and “heroism” are not mutually exclusive
emphases—they operate on the same conceptual plane and depend upon
one another through bodies in competition. In the tale of Ehud and Eglon,
readers do not find an easy line between shame and honor or truth and lies.
As in the very wording of Ehud’s “secret message,” our assessment uneasily
pivots in either direction. Even Eglon’s act of standing up from his throne,
which, positioned in his special royal room, most straightforwardly reads as
a royal act of respect or an excited readiness to receive the message, can just
as easily pivot in the other direction: he stands in a state of alarm, horrified at
what he already sees.75
Judges 4:4–24: Deborah and Jael

While not featuring bodily cues to the same overt extent as the previous
stories we’ve examined involving Adoni-Bezek, Ehud, and Eglon, the ac-
count of Deborah and especially Jael in Judges 4 explicitly narrates a scene
of bodily action with clear thematic ties back to the Ehud-Eglon encounter.76
Before analyzing the details of this scene, readers must acknowledge a
bodily reality here that infuses the chapter with a distinct tone vis-à-vis all
other leaders and military heroes in Judges: Deborah and Jael are women.
The narrator makes no explicit reference to any particular female aspect
of their bodies typically noted by biblical narrators—for example, wombs
and breasts, barrenness or childbearing—and thus readers are not im-
mediately asked to focus on the femaleness of the bodies (compare, for
74. Compare with the analysis in Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity
in Ancient Greek Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 11.
75. So Halpern, First Historians, 59.
76. On bodily dynamics in Judges 4–5, see esp. Vermeulen, “Hands.” This essay came to my
attention too late for more robust citation and analysis, but deserves mention for its nuanced
way of reading many hitherto unnoticed aspects of the body.
81
example, to Sarai in Gen 11:30).77 Deborah and Jael enjoy a long and rich re-
ception history, and illuminating gender analyses of Judges 4–5 abound.78
I am taking for granted, then, the fact that Deborah and Jael have partic-
ularly female bodies as a notable frame of significance for whatever else
we find in their intertwined stories, and their female heroic bodies in this
text prompt reflection on whether there is anything particularly mascu-
line about what occurs in the cases of other characters. On several fronts,
the narrator of Judges 4 links aspects of Deborah and Jael with Ehud
in the previous chapter.79 The verb used for Jael’s tent-peg-thrust, taqa,
is the same word used for Ehud’s thrust into Eglon’s belly as well as for
the horn “blow” Ehud enacts to call the army to war (Judg 3:27); the root
of Deborah’s name, davar, echoes the devar elohim Ehud delivers;80 and
on broader levels, both stories utilize a similar pattern of dramatic action
for the killing (enclosed/secret space, unsuspecting victim, sexual innu-
endo, sharp object thrust, instant death and subsequent deliverance for
Israel). Thus, perhaps we must understand Deborah’s and Jael’s actions,
as women, in parallel at foundational levels to the actions of Ehud, a man.
Their status as women in particular, however, if not highlighted already
by their names and other feminine indicators grammatically (Deborah
is a “prophetess,” nevi’a; Judg 4:4)81 or by their identification with their
husbands (4:4; 4:21), does come to have at least some oblique signifi-
cance in the “Song of Deborah” in Judges 5. Here, in a fascinating turn
of phrase, Deborah “arose” (qwm) as a “mother in Israel” (em beyisrael;
5:16).82 Distinctly, for her part, Deborah sits (šwb) under a tree to receive vis-
itors “for judgment” (lamishpat; Judg 4:5), then rises (qwm; 4:9) to go with
77. It may be the case, as Matthews, Judges and Ruth, 64, suggests, that we are to see Deborah
as a “postmenopausal female, who, like the ‘wise women’ of the David narrative (2 Sam
14:2–20; 20:15–22), functions as an elder.”
78. E.g., Colleen M. Conway, Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael: A Cultural History of a
Biblical Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Joy A. Schroeder, Deborah’s
Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
as well as Gunn, Judges,  53–92.
79. See Niditch, Judges, 58, for some of this.
80. Klaas Spronk, “Deborah, a Prophetess: The Meaning and Background of Judges 4:4–5,”
in The Elusive Prophet: The Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character and Anonymous
Artist, ed. Johannes C. De Moor (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 232–42, here 239–40 on the name
etymology.
81. On this designation nevi’a, see Spronk, “Deborah.”
82. On this unusual phrase (but see also possibly 2 Sam 20:19), see Sasson, Judges, 289–90;
Sasson suggests that the “mother” title here contrasts to Sisera’s mother later in the poem.
28
Barak. Aside from these moments, Deborah is essentially bodyless in the

text. Her sitting-in-judgment posture casts her in a regal physical role, and
thus she is the only judge who sits judging in this way among the Judges.
We may compare her to the image of the king in Prov 20:8 sitting on the
“throne of judgment” (melek yoshev al-kisse-diyn) or Solomon’s role in the
case of the two women and their dispute over a child in 1 Kgs 3:16–28,
where the king renders “judgment” (mishpat [without explicitly sitting]).
More explicitly in Deborah’s own announcement to Barak (Judg 4:9),
however: “YHWH will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman (beyad-ishah).”83
Of the nearly 1,500 uses of the term “hand” (yad) in the Hebrew Bible, this
seems to be the only instance where the hand as an indication of military
or heroic power belongs to a woman—and, uniquely again, Jael’s physical
hand (i.e., as opposed to the use of yad as “power, agency, direction,” etc.)
alone among women grasps a (makeshift) set of weapons (a hammer and
tent-peg; Judg 4:21). After Jael lures Sisera into her tent and covers him
with a blanket, the action occurs swiftly (Judg 4:21):
Jael wife of Heber took a tent-peg and hammer in her hand, came
to (bo) him quietly, and drove the tent-peg into his temple (rqq), and
it thrust down (tsanach) into the ground, while he slept soundly, for
he was weary, and he died.
In recapitulation (or alternate narration) of the incident in the “Song of

Deborah” in Judges 5,84 Sisera’s status after the blow receives more elabo-
ration and possibly indicates a different position for the victim when Jael
makes the blow (vv. 26–27):
She stretched out her hand to the tent-peg,

her right hand to the worker’s mallet (halmut),
and malleted (halam) Sisera, crushed his head,
shattered and pierced his temple (rqq).
Between her feet (regel) he bowed (kara),
83. Compare with Abimelek’s fear in Judg 9:54, and also similar references in Judith 9:9–10,
13:15, 16:5. In Judg 4:14, however, Deborah makes the same offer to Barak: “Arise! For on this
day YHWH has given Sisera into your hand.”
84. For different perspectives on the two accounts vis-à-vis one another, see, e.g., Robert
Alter, “From Line to Story in Biblical Verse,” PT 4.4 (1983): 615–37, here 629–36; Halpern,
First Historians, 76–103; and Athalya Brenner, “A Triangle and a Rhombus in Narrative
Structure: A Proposed Integrative Reading of Judges iv and v,” VT 40.2 (1990): 129–38.
83
he fell, he lay down,
between her feet he bowed, he fell;
where he bowed, there he feel, devastated.
Sisera’s bowing and lying at Jael’s feet may refer—if correlated to the
prose account in chapter 4—to Sisera’s fatal nap before the killing, or
even, if the two accounts are not to be correlated, to his status after the
blow, that is, indicating that he stood erect before their battle and then
fell to the ground afterward. Sisera’s position in the poem, “between her
feet,” serves at once as a military defeat metaphor85 and as a vaguely sexual
conquest (differently indicated but still present in the prose version).86 In
Judges 4, the narrator accounts for the strangeness of anyone being able
to drive a tent peg directly through another’s head in this way through
supporting details, such as the blanket covering (rendering him more im-
mobile, or symbolically as a child in her care),87 the emphasis on Sisera’s
sound sleeping and weary state, and the physical place of tent peg-entry,
namely, the “temple” (rqq), a soft spot on the head (perhaps alternately
the “cheeks,” though in this case we cannot imagine a tent stake killing a
man at one stroke piercing through the cheeks).88 In Judges 5, on the other
hand, Jael’s action comes off more directly, even quicker than in Judges
4. Notwithstanding the deceptive hospitality setup in Judg 5:25 (mirroring
4:19), Jael seems to encounter Sisera in Judges 5 on an open battlefield.
Judges 4 has the tent peg driven through with needle-like anatomical pre-
cision, whereas in Judges 5 Jael rises up and directly crushes his skull.
An odd interaction in Judg 1:11– 15 narrates a brief and seemingly
gratuitous bodily gesture in the story of Achsah’s acquisition of a field
with a potential resonance in the story of Jael. Achsah initially urges her
uncle-husband, Othniel, to request a field from her father, Caleb. With no
85. See, e.g., Ps 18:39(38) for enemies falling “under my feet,” and iconographically in the
Naram-Sin stele (in Chapter 4 of this book).
86. For analysis on these lines, see Vermeulen, “Hands,” 815–16; Susan Niditch, “Eroticism
and Death in the Tale of Jael,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 43–57; Danna N. Fewell and David M. Gunn, “Controlling
Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4 and 5,” JAAR 58.3
(1990): 389–411; and a review with many sources in Conway, Sex,  17–23.
87. Note also the offer of milk to drink, perhaps symbolic of breast-milk (in the mother-child
reading); e.g., Sasson, Judges, 267–68.
88. Sasson, Judges, 269. The rqq appears infrequently in the Bible as a body part, only else-
where in Songs 4:3 and 6:7.
48
indicated follow-up or result to this request, we transition immediately to

Achsah asking Caleb directly for the field: “She dismounted (tsanach) from
the donkey, and Caleb said to her, ‘What do you want?’ And she said, ‘Give
me a blessing (present)” (Judg 1:14–15). Why does she have to dismount
from a donkey to say this? The account had not previously mentioned that
she was riding a donkey. Aside from this “dismounting” action in Judg 1:14
(and its doublet in Josh 15:18), the only other appearance of the verb tsanach
occurs in Judg 4:21, to describe what the tent peg does when Jael drives it
through Sisera’s head—that is, it tsanachs into the ground. Commentators
have debated the meaning of the verb, and presumably it could mean the
same thing in both contexts—both passages involve women encountering
men and emerging victorious.89 The tent peg surely goes down into the
ground, but for Achsah, the arguments for the meaning of the tsanach
gesture falter on lack of clear evidence; coming down, thrusting down,
jumping down so hard on the ground as to stick into the ground (to com-
pare it to Judges 4:21), clapping hands, and even, (in)famously in the NEB
(first fully published in 1970), “breaking wind.”90 Contextually within the
story, as Bal points out,91 Caleb’s expression (mah-lak, lit. “what to/for
you?”) may indicate surprise92—an attitude not expected if one’s daughter
merely rides up and alights from a donkey in a normal fashion. Bal recom-
mends the “clapped hands” translation of tsanach to explain the tenor of
the interaction,93 though the traditional rendering “descend”—especially if
read to imply rapid or sudden action, as it seems to imply for the tent peg
in Judg 4:2—explains the interaction equally as well.
Two further reflexes of the present story in Judges 4–5 warrant brief
comment regarding heroes and bodies. First, in Judg 9:50–57, a woman
89. Bal, Death, 149–57; see longer treatments of the philology in Ernest W. Nicholson,
“The Problem of [TSNCH],” ZAW 89.2 (1977): 259– 65, and various reading possibil-
ities in Danna Nolan Fewell, “Deconstructive Criticism: Achsah and the (E)razed City of
Writing,” in Judges and Method: New Approaches to Biblical Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Gale A. Yee
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 115–37.
90. See Nicholson, “Problem,” for these possibilities and the origins of the “breaking wind”
translation.
91. Bal, Death, 150.
92. For other uses of the mah-le(+suffix) expression indicating a heightened emotional situ-
ation or expectation on the part of the speaker that something is wrong with the person ad-
dressed (to be translated, e.g., “What’s wrong?” “What is your problem?” “Who do you think
you are?” or at the very least, an urgent “What do you want?”), see, e.g., Gen 21:17; Josh 22:24;
Judg 18:3; 18:23–24; 2 Sam 14:5; 1 Kgs 1:16; 2 Kgs 6:28; Ezek 18:2; Esth 5:3.
93. Bal, Death, 154–55.
85
at Thebez drops a millstone on Abimelech’s head, crushing his skull. The

woman’s act of devastating a man’s head broadly mirrors Jael’s act, and
explicit fears surrounding death at the hand of a woman appear in both
stories. In Judg 9:54, Abimelech begs his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword
and kill me, lest they say of me, ‘A woman killed him’,” and Deborah boasts
that the battle glory will belong to a woman (Jael) instead of a man in
Judg 4:9. The final form of Judges offers several instances where women
speak or act wisely, faithfully, and practically in response to men whom
the narrator portrays as fearful, confused, or ineffective (e.g., also Judg
11:36; 13:23). Perhaps we are to understand something programmatic in
this regard.
Additionally, in a clear (and chronologically much later) reflex of the Jael
account, the Greek book of Judith narrates the actions of its hero, Judith, a
woman repeatedly described as ravishingly beautiful, as she craftily lures
the Assyrian general Holofernes into a tent, waits until he sleeps (already
in a state of near-dead-drunkenness), and cuts off his head with two sword-
hacks.94 The reprise concerning Judith’s triumph as victory “by the hand
of a woman” punctuates the drama (Jdt 9:9–10, 13:15, 16:5), culminating in
a poem—sung by Judith herself in the narrative—celebrating her female
status vis-à-vis other types of heroic bodies (Jdt 16:5–6, NRSV [slightly
revised]):
The Lord Almighty has foiled them by the hand of a woman.

For their mighty one did not fall by the hands of the
young men,
nor did the sons of the Titans strike him down,
nor did tall giants set upon him;
but Judith daughter of Merari—
with the beauty of her countenance undid him.
For the poet here, Judith’s beautiful body is the killer, and Holofernes’s
misrecognition of that body’s capabilities seals his fate. The slippage be-
tween Judith’s “hand,” by which the Lord foils the enemy, and the “beauty
94. See the commentary by Deborah Levine Gera, Judith (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014),
and the analysis of the beauty and body motif in Benjamin G. Wright and Suzanne M.
Edwards, “‘She Undid Him with the Beauty of Her Face’ (Jdt 16.6): Reading Women’s
Bodies in Early Jewish Literature,” in Religion and Female Body in Ancient Judaism and Its
Environments, ed. Géza G. Xeravits (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 73–108, esp. 78–87.
68
of her countenance” is particularly fascinating. We are thus invited to con-

sider bodily beauty as a weapon of warfare.
Judges 13–16: Samson
Notwithstanding notable references to supernatural strength, killing
ability, and speed often inspired by the “spirit of YHWH” rushing upon
him (Judg 13:25; 14:6; 14:19; 15:4; 15:14; 16:3; 16:8–12; 16:29–30), Samson’s
body seems relatively normal—except for his hair (Judges 16, with an in-
itial reference to the Nazirite vow at Judg 13:4). The divine messenger’s
instructions to Samson’s mother directly identifies him as a Nazirite,
invoking proscriptions on alcohol and hair-cutting:
And now, observe carefully: you will not drink wine or beer, and you
will not eat anything unclean, for you will conceive and bear a son—
and no razor will pass over his head, for the boy will be a Nazir of
God from the womb. (Judg 13:4–5)
Despite the hair reference here, abstention from alcohol is the only charac-
teristic of the Nazirite situation that continues to come up in the repeated
conversations about the child in the remainder of the chapter. Numbers
6 formally spells out the situation of the Nazirite, with a clear mandate
regarding the hair:
All the days of his Nazirite vow, no razor will pass upon his head,
until the fulfillment of the days that he has acted as a Nazirite (yazzir
[or: “dedicated]) for YHWH. He will be holy—he will grow out the
locks of hair (pera se’ar) upon his head. (Num 6:5)
Num 6:9 then further stipulates that the hair must be shaved if the
Nazirite comes into contact with a corpse; otherwise, the law/ritual offers
no reason for the hair treatment, and no completely obvious theological or
physical rationale comes to mind.95 Interpreters commonly associate the
hair with “strength,” “vitality,” or “life force” (perhaps in anticipation of
95. See Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1–20 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), esp. 229–44 for
various ideas.
8
7
the Samson drama),96 and indeed this may be a primary meaning behind
the ritual logic of the Nazirite (though in fact the Numbers 6 ritual may
be historically differentiated from Samson’s status).97 Still, as a malleable
and prominent cultural symbol, hair encodes many levels of meaning,
and, in the case of Samson’s hair, communicates more than mere physical
strength. In the Hebrew Bible the root nzr often alludes directly to a body
part, namely, the head, sometimes with hair implied,98 thus making the
proscription on hair-cutting a natural or possibly even original element of
the “Nazirite” situation.
In his classic The Religion of the Semites (first published in 1889),
Robertson Smith mentioned hair dedication rituals related to mourning
and vow fulfillment, suggesting that in these cases hair bound the living
and dead together in ritual communion, or, alternatively, that hair func-
tioned for initiation rites (into manhood, marriage, etc). Moreover, for
Smith, hair dedication was a highly personal act, not communal,99 an ob-
servation that accords with the Nazirite in Numbers 6 as well as Samson’s
individual ordeals. From the perspective of anthropology more generally,
96. Key works on the meaning of Samson’s hair, reviewing past work and offering their
own analyses, include Susan Niditch, “Samson as Culture Hero, Trickster, and Bandit: The
Empowerment of the Weak,” CBQ 52.4 (1990): 608–24; “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy
Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 63–
80; Gregory Mobley, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” JBL 116.2
(1997): 217–233, esp. 228–33, and then Mobley’s expanded study, Samson and the Liminal
Hero in the Ancient Near East (London: T & T Clark, 2008); Stephen M. Wilson, “Samson
the Man-Child: Failing to Come of Age in the Deuteronomistic History,” JBL 133.1 (2014): 43–
60, esp. 43–46 and Stephen M. Wilson, Making Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in the
Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 132–34; see also Saul M. Olyan, “What
Do Shaving Rites Accomplish and What Do They Signal in Biblical Ritual Contexts?” JBL
117.4 (1998): 611–22, with no direct reference to Samson but with rich discussion of what
hair can signify. For a recent volume exploring various aspects of the Samson stories and
reception history in a number of areas, see Erik M. M. Eynikel and Tobias Nicklas (eds.),
Samson: Hero or Fool? The Many Faces of Samson (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
97. The question—which cannot be solved here—of whether the seemingly temporary nature
of the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6 can be squared with other narrative depictions of (life-
long?) Nazirite dedications, specifically the boy Samuel in 1 Samuel 1–3 and Samson here in
Judges 13–16, has occupied many studies of the Nazirite ritual; see, e.g., Niditch, My Brother
Esau, 81–94, who assumes, along with most critical interpreters, that Samson’s vow is of a
type different from the priestly ritual in Numbers 6.
98. E.g., in older-style poetic materials, Gen 49:26 and Deut 33:16, and compare with Jer
7:29; for turban and crown language related to nēzer, e.g., Exod 29:6; Lev 8:9; 2 Sam 1:10; 2
Sam 11:12; Zech 9:16; Ps 132:18.
99. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series: The
Fundamental Institutions, new edition (London: A & C Black, 1907), 323–31.
8
mid-twentieth-century agenda-setting essays by Edmund Leach and C. R.

Hallpike explored hair as a significant aspect of cultural expression,100
and later studies in their wake appropriately emphasized the multiplicity
and ambiguity of hair meanings, eschewing universal models in favor of
more historically situated case studies.101 Hair can signify wildness, matu-
rity, and masculinity; it can signal femininity or pubescence; rebellion or
conformity.
Bodily analogies or movements aside from hair play a limited though
notable role in the Samson narratives. For example, at several points
Samson is associated with animal bodies, highlighting his strong-animal-
like status.102 In Judg 14:5–9, Samson tears apart an attacking lion—surely a
symbol of the supernatural strength attendant upon the “spirit of YHWH”
rushing upon him, but also gesturing toward acts of bodily dismember-
ment at both the beginning and end of the book (Adoni-Bezek in Judges
1, the concubine in Judges 19). Later, Samson returns to the lion to find its
carcass swarming with bees and full of honey, a scene that, despite any at-
tempt to explain it, comes off as particularly odd.103 Susan Niditch’s reading
of the episode points to the honey as a further sign that Samson is a lim-
inal sort of character, “one jousting between cultures” and statuses: honey
may be viewed as a marriage food (note that Samson is on his way to be
married when he finds the honey), it is the product of a mysterious process
for ancient people, it is an ambiguous substance (neither fully solid nor
fully liquid) and a source of mystical energy (note Jonathan’s honey-eating
story in 1 Sam 14:29), and, strangely encased within the body of a lion, a
miraculous food source.104 Indeed, the status of the honey within the lion
amplifies the effect of both lion and honey, creating a supercharged and
mysterious concoction for a man now further identified with wild power.
In the narrative drama that follows, Samson enacts multiple slaughters,
culminating in Judg 15:14–17, where the hero takes up a donkey jawbone,
100. Edmund R. Leach, “Magical Hair,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland 88.2 (1958): 147–64; C. R. Hallpike, “Social Hair,” Man 4.2 (1969): 256–64.
101. Review in Niditch, My Brother Esau,  3–13.
102. Particularly highlighted by Mobley, “Wild Man,” 218, 229.
103. Many read the scene as showing him violating some aspect of his Nazirite status through
contact with a corpse (at least according to how Numbers defines that status); e.g., Matthews,
Judges and Ruth, 146.
104. Niditch, Judges, 155–56.
98
kills an astonishing one thousand men, and recites a poem with word-play
on the word for “donkey,” chamor:
And Samson said:
“With the jawbone of a donkey (chamor),
one heap (chamor), a double-heap (chamoratayim),
with the jawbone of a donkey
I struck down one thousand men.”
When he finished speaking, he tossed the jawbone
from his hand, and called that place “Height of the
Jawbone.” (Judg 15:16–17)
The hero’s use of a crude nature-weapon further draws him into an animal
identity.105 But why have Samson toss the jawbone in this way after reciting
the poem? A physical gesture like this is relatively rare in the Hebrew
Bible, especially with no clear reason for the gesture. The action has a cin-
ematic quality, perhaps with a connotation of arrogance or disdain for his
victims, and draws further attention to the etiological note that concludes
the story (the name of the place, ramat lechi, “Height of Jawbone”; note
also the etiology that follows in verses 18–20).
Analyses of Samson’s status as a heroic figure—specifically as a male
heroic figure, embodying elements of heroic culture, the trope of the “wild
man,” and more—rightly focus on his hair. At long last, separated by sev-
eral chapters from the Nazirite hair-notice in Judg 13:4, in 16:13 we return
to Samson’s hair, bound in “seven locks” upon his head and then in 16:15–
31 to the famous hair-cutting story and final act of physical strength once
the hair grows back. As with other episodes we have examined in this
chapter, certain features of the story call back to previous characters and
narratives. Consider, for example, Delilah, who annoys Samson into re-
vealing the secret of his strength (his hair) and then cuts it so that he can
be captured—like Jael, she takes a man into her intimate care (“at her
knees/lap”) where he falls asleep (Judg 16:19; compare with 5:27), both
women enact trauma to the head (tent peg to the temple, and cutting off
the hair), and the verbal sequence of taqa + yater describes for both women
105. Mobley, “Wild Man,” 229, 233.

09
the act of fastening or striking the hair or head followed by use of a tent
peg or pin (Judg 4:21, 16:14).106
Drawing on the seminal work of Richard Bernheimer in Wild Men in the
Middle Ages (1952) and a rich array of other literature,107 Gregory Mobley cites
hairiness as the single pivotal feature of the “wild man,” a recurring char-
acter in the folklore of many historical periods and literatures.108 In Mobley’s
review of the wild man theme, unkempt or long hair signifies a connection
with nature, connections with the animal world—one thinks immediately
of Enkidu in the Gilgamesh Epic, whose transition from animal-man to fully
human comes with a significant hair-trimming—and a lusty aggressiveness
physically enacted through the crawling, teeming, out-of-control hair growing
out of the head (and many other places). From the realm of Mesopotamian
iconography, the figure of the laḫmu (“hairy one”) can be analyzed as a “hairy
hero man” straddling the boundary between the absolutely wild man and the
heroic “knightly” figure.109 Distinctive warrior hairstyles, such as having the
hair in a long plait or as a strand down the back tied with a band (fillet), occur
in Egyptian reliefs depicting Semitic warriors from the Levant (possibly even
Israelites). In a striking warrior “self-portrait” on a Philistine bichrome vessel,
the presumably Philistine combatant sports a wild “mohawk” style and fights
a monster (?) (see Fig. 3.1).110 Though Samson’s distinctive hair is most di-
rectly correlated with the Israelite Nazirite practice, the fact that Philistines
may have sported notable warrior hairstyles further hints at Samson’s re-
peated association with Philistines in the Judges narrative.
Samson’s hair fulcrums the narrative. The narrative tension of Judges
16 pivots solely on the mounting pressure to figure out the secret of his
strength, getting closer and closer to the source, twice ineffectively binding
the man, then tying up the hair (16:13–14), and finally cutting it—the fateful
106. All noted by Baker, Hollow Men,  52–53.

107. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and
Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952); see also David Bynum, The
Daemon in the Wood: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1978), esp. 42–51 and 58–64 on Samson.
108. Mobley, “Wild Man,” 218.
109. Mobley, “Wild Man,” 218–19 on the general “wild man” features, and 223–24 on the
laḫmu tradition.
110. David Ben-Shlomo, Philistine Iconography: A Wealth of Style and Symbolism
(Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010), 51–54; Lawrence E. Stager and Penelope A. Mountjoy,
“A Pictorial Krater from Philistine Ashkelon,” in “Up to the Gates of Ekron”: Essays on the
Archaeology and History of the Eastern Mediterranean in Honor of Seymour Gitin, ed. by Sidney
White Crawford et al. (Jerusalem: W. F. Albright Institute and the Israel Exploration Society,
2007), 50–61; Niditch, My Brother Esau,  37–39.
91
Figure 3.1. Philistine bichrome vessel with painted figures (warrior fighting

monster?)
act (16:15–21).111 As Samson’s hair begins to grow back (16:22), the audience
already must suspect what will happen; he will regain the strength and
use it one final time. An act of bodily mutilation yet again figures into
the drama. The Philistines gouge Samson’s eyes out (16:21), and Samson’s
final prayer for revenge cites the loss of his two eyes as the grounds for the
payback (16:28; evoking the lex talionis principle of Exod 21:24). For all of
Samson’s travel between Israel and Philistia, his liminality, and his back-
and-forth-ness, the hair shearing marks his final march toward death and
ensures, like Achilles’s act of hair cutting and dedication at the tomb of
Patroclus in Iliad 23, that he will, in the end, not return home.112 He does
111. Niditch, “Samson,” 616–17, and My Brother Esau, 67, sees this as a symbolic castration.
112. See J. Mira Seo, Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 137, on cutting hair as act of death preparation for Achilles. Other
potential associations between the Samson stories and Greek myth and epic must remain
unexplored here, but see the set of short essays by Othniel Margalith, who considers major
elements of the Samson stories as Philistine (i.e., Indo-European) in origin: “Samson’s
Foxes,” VT 35.2 (1985): 224–29; “Samson’s Riddle and Samson’s Magic Locks,” VT 36.2
29
however return home, in a sense after death, as his family collects his body
for burial in an ancestral tomb (16:31).
In addition to Samson’s hair drama in these chapters, three other cases
related to heroic hair can now be addressed:
(1) When locks grow long in Israel. The putatively archaic “Song of
Deborah” poem in Judges 5, discussed earlier with reference to its recapit-
ulation of the Jael narrative, opens with a reference to hair:
Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang on that day, saying:

“When locks grow long (biphroa peraot) in Israel,
When people offer themselves willingly—
Bless YHWH!” (Judg  5:1–2)
If the translation of root pera here is correct as “let loose, unmanaged, un-
covered,”113 then the hair image possibly evokes a military hairstyle (long,
flowing locks), a style mirrored in some iconography and reminiscent of
military cultures across time and geography in which hair conformity cele-
brates team activity and common purpose.114 More generally, and of great
significance for the heroic spirit of Judges as a whole, the locks-grown-long
specifies an aura of freedom, virility, and the excitement of revolutionary
beginnings—a pristine moment of freewill service (viz., before royal mil-
itary conscription; 1 Sam 8:11–12), of wild military maneuvers and muti-
lations that rouse excitement, at least before the effects of such violence
come full circle back on the nation in uglier ways. Here the poet openly
celebrates the free-flowing hair that becomes Samson’s undoing. This hair
is only a blessing, uncomplicated by Israel’s losses.
(2) Red all over, with a hairy mantle. Having discussed aspects of Esau’s
hair (Genesis 25 and 27) in Chapter 2 of this book, I mention it here again
as a reminder that hairiness can signify more than the “positive” aspects of
heroism or military adventure. In Esau’s case, the hair evokes the “nature-
culture” divide between himself and his brother, but also aspects of impul-
sivity, animality, and perhaps even racial polemic (i.e., his red hair and the
association with Edom). Unlike Samson, Esau is no riddler, poet, or lover.
(1986): 225–34; “More Samson Legends,” VT 36.4 (1986): 397–405. Samson’s suitability as

a Greek-style hero in the tragic mode can be seen in Milton’s 1671 drama Samson Agonistes.
113. See Niditch, My Brother Esau, 75–77, and Judges, 78; Smith, Poetic Heroes, 223–24.
114. Niditch, My Brother Esau,  34–60.
9
3
(3) Two-hundred shekel hair. A fascinating and ultimately ambiguous

case of long heroic hair in the Bible occurs in the Absalom narratives of 2
Samuel, particularly 2 Sam 14:25–27 and 18:9–15, where, as with Samson,
an initial and seemingly forgotten comment about hair comes back with a
vengeance for the character’s ultimate fate:115
Now Absalom—there was no one as beautiful (yapheh) as him in all

Israel to be praised so much; from the sole of his foot to the top of
his head there was no blemish in him. When he cut off the hair of
his head—from time to time he would cut it, for it grew heavy upon
him, so he had to cut it—he weighed the hair of his head: two hun-
dred shekels [approx. six–eight pounds?] by the stone of the king. (1
Sam 14:25–26)
Absalom’s hair here seems connected with his general “beauty” as well as
his virility and power (note that v. 27 reports the birth of his children—
three sons, and one beautiful daughter—an indicator of virility),116 with
the long hair specifically functioning symbolically as it does for Samson in
this respect. Hidden in the (miraculously? unrealistically?) heavy stack of
hair, however, is a trap: excess, overreach, arrogance.117 Why and for whom
is he weighing the hair?118
The plot payoff comes several chapters later, perhaps as most readers
would have forgotten about the hair, at the end of a battle scene during
which Absalom’s life ends:
Absalom was riding upon a mule, and the mule came under the
thick branches of a great oak tree; his head tangled up in the oak,
and he was caught between heaven and earth while the mule went
on from beneath him. (2 Sam 18:9)
115. Other aspects of Absalom’s physicality, such as his beauty (2 Sam 14:25), also factor into
the story; I will resume the discussion of royal physicality in Chapter 4 of this book.
116. As suggested by Wilson, “Samson the Man-Child,” 46, and Niditch, My Brother Esau, 79.
117. On this idea, see Niditch, My Brother Esau, 79.
118. Stuart Macwilliam, “Ideologies of Male Beauty and the Hebrew Bible,” BI 17.3
(2009): 265–87, 279–83 on Absalom; Macwilliam sees the “vanity” argument as uncon-
vincing, but does see his beauty and demises as connected.
49
Here the deadly curse of the hair reveals itself. The hair was gorgeous,
but also reckless. The over-nature and abundance the hair represents
gets intertwined—literally and symbolically—with the gnarled dangerous
branches of the tree. As Absalom hangs there, totally helpless, Joab and
his fellow soldiers stab and kill him (18:14–15). The repetition of the word
“heart” in the death scene drives home the parallel between Absalom and
the tree: “He (Joab) took three spears in his hand and thrust them into the
heart (lev) of Absalom while he was still alive in the heart (lev) of the oak.”119
Conclusion: The Concubine, the Left Hand,

and the Body of Israel
Returning to the theme with which we began the examination in this
chapter, that of the torn national body, we now see that the final stunning
scene of pornographic bodily violence, the rape and dismemberment of
the nameless woman (Judg 19:29), participates in the book’s meditation
on bodies as sites of violence in a final grisly comment. The concubine
is not “heroic” in any traditional sense, though; along with Jephthah’s
daughter, she suffers as a type of sacrifice at the hands of violent men—
her body in place of theirs.120
The division of the individual body into twelve parts leads directly to
the national division, linking the two events so bluntly as to avoid any mis-
understanding about what is happening. Following the Levite’s speech to
rally the nation, Judg 20:8 and 20:11 mention the corporate body united,
“all Israel” and “all the men of Israel,” “united as one” as perhaps never
before in the book, to take vengeance against the Benjamites concerning
the outrage. The Benjamites unite in opposition, including a force of
seven hundred left-handed slingers (20:16).121 Though not using the same
verb to describe the cutting as for the dismemberment of the concubine
in 19:29 (natach, “divide”), 21:6 alludes to the fear of bodily and corpo-
rate division by pondering the fate of Benjamin if one tribe is “cut off”
119. Niditch, My Brother Esau, 79.

120. See, e.g., the pioneering analysis by Phyllis Trible in Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist
Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 65–116 on both Jephthah’s
daughter and the concubine. Bal, Death, 93, 119–27, reads the concubine’s death as a “ritual
sacrifice.”
121. See the earlier discussion for Ehud on the left-handed military tactic as reality and
symbol, and the analysis in Park, “Left-Handed,” 703–04, 712, 717.
9
5
(gada) from Israel; Judg 21:15 then speaks of a “breach” (perets) in the tribes,
caused by YHWH. Gale Yee, to choose one interpreter who has tried to
situate these concluding narratives historically, sees Judges 17–21 as a
broader unit in which a narrator, writing in the seventh century bce as
part of the Josianic ideological program, attempted to “resolve” a complex
set of collisions involving power, economics, and cult. In this interpreta-
tion, the narrator ultimately acted to discredit “country Levites” who might
oppose centralization as well as to paint a dysfunctional tribal system, in-
capable of binding the nation together the way a strongly centralized mon-
arch would.122 Even if not correct in its historical correlation or all details,
a reading like Yee’s helpfully evokes some real national circumstance in
which unity and division were topics of life and death. Based on the many
subtle and un-subtle correlations with and polemics against the Saulide
house shot through the Judges narrative (e.g., most obviously, Gibeah is
Saul’s hometown, within the tribe of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe),123 I am in-
clined to see the most primal elements of the conflict in an earlier period,
echoing out from as early as the Davidic dynasty and its attempts to legiti-
mate itself over and against Saul.
Again taking up the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s argument re-
garding the body in Natural Symbols, “the social body constrains the way
the physical body is perceived,”124 we are now in a strong position to no-
tice how Judges reveals itself as a crucial site for both heroes and bodily
description. As we have seen, this is precisely because themes of dismem-
berment and bodily disintegration communicate profoundly as political
literature, not merely as ciphers for victimization and individual loss of
life. In Judges, the perception of the body is multifaceted, creative, and
clever. These pre-monarchic bodies must give way to bodies better suited
to national unity—but what might an Israelite monarchic body look like?
122. Gale A. Yee, “Ideological Criticism: Judges 17–21 and the Dismembered Body,” in Judges
and Method: New Approaches to Biblical Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Gale A. Yee (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2007), 138–60, esp. 144–47, 157.
123. See discussion in Park, “Left-Handed,” and Amit, Hidden Polemics, 178–84.
69
9
7
The Iconography of the Heroic Body
Material Exegesis of the Heroic Body

What does a heroic body look like? How might ancient Israelites throughout
the Iron Age have visually imagined or viewed such a body? As much as
anything we study in the Hebrew Bible, the body is an inherently visual
topic. Therefore in this chapter I analyze the way heroic bodies were icono-
graphically portrayed in Israel’s historical and geographical environments,
and more specifically, wherever possible, within the Levant and even an-
cient Israel itself of the Iron Age.1 Of course, texts describe visual aspects
of the world in rich and subtle ways, as I hope I have been demonstrating
in the other chapters in this book, but pictures tell a distinct story, cor-
responding more directly to the material appearance of their subject.
By taking an iconographic departure from the textual studies elsewhere
in this book, even at the risk of incongruity from those textual studies,
I follow analyses like those of Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger in
their landmark study Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel,
who make a strong claim against using texts alone to reconstruct a system
of belief and practice from the ancient world.2 The editors of more recent
volume, Iconographic Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (2015), also
point to the lack of serious engagement with iconographic evidence in
most biblical studies scholarship. These editors correctly assert that using
1. For bibliographic leads and a general point of departure for this topic, I have made fre-
quent use of Mark Smith’s Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior
Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), mainly 24–32, but
referenced throughout his study.
2. Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient
Israel, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998), 7–11.
89
images along with texts makes eminent sense considering the function
of images—they are not “mere decorations” but rather conveyers of “cru-
cial information”—and the preponderance of iconographic images over
written sources.3 “Texts were no doubt important in ancient Israel,” they
write, “but images seem to have been produced and distributed in far
greater quantities and so were more likely to have been encountered in
everyday life than inscriptions.”4
Though we have no direct proof that any particular heroic-bodily repre-
sentation in the Hebrew Bible can be correlated with or was derived from
any particular iconographic item, I do work with the assumptions that
(1) the living heroic body was demarcated visually in ancient Israel’s envi-
ronment, (2) in some cases the heroic bodies were treated in distinct ways
after death, and (3) the Hebrew Bible naturally reflects standard aspects of
a thick, multifaceted visual culture in its textual representations. Like texts,
of course, iconography displays ideals, fictitious scenarios, and exagger-
ations; we are not permitted to assume that images will take us closer to the
“reality” of ancient heroic-bodily conceptions than a text. Yet an interaction
with material culture allows glimpses into a lived world that texts obscure
or simply cannot address. In particular, I have chosen to focus on warrior
bodies in this chapter as an instantiation of the heroic phenomenon. The
other two broad aspects of the heroic definition I have been working with
in this book, founding figures and kings, are sometimes distinctly repre-
sented iconographically—for example, for a king, seated on a throne or
engaged in other acts; “founding figures” are far less available for this kind
of analysis. A different choice for the heroic iconographic frame would of
course produce different examples, and a comprehensive review of all pos-
sible heroic bodies in iconography would be expansive (and illuminating)
beyond what I can provide here. In a recent and detailed review of ancient
Near Eastern iconography related to the Psalms, Joel LeMon sketches out a
“typology of representational violence,” differentiating “potential violence”
from “kinetic violence” and “resultative violence”—the potential examples
can include the types of images I have selected for discussion, such as
figures poised to strike or kill, but also subtler representations within the
3. Izaak J. de Hulster, Brent A. Strawn, and Ryan P. Bonfiglio, “Iconographic Exegesis: Method
and Practice,” in Iconographic Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: An Introduction to
Its Method and Practice, ed. Izaak J. de Hulster, Brent A. Strawn, and Ryan P. Bonfiglio
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 20–21.
4. de Hulster, Strawn, and Bonfiglio, “Iconographic Exegesis,” 21.
99
Iconography of the Heroic Body 99
frame of resultative action, such as a king standing near a pile of severed

heads or otherwise presiding over the aftermath of a slaughter.5 The vio-
lent body comes in many iconographic forms, not all of which involve a
figure striking or engaged in kinetic heroic activity.
Nevertheless, the type-scene of the hero with arm raised (the “striking,”
“smiting,” or “menacing” posture) comes to the fore as the preeminent
iconography of the heroic body in Egypt and the Levant, where striking
heroic figures become a norm for warrior representations.6 In the Hebrew
Bible, the “divine warrior” trope prominently features the arm or hand of
the deity, poised to strike in war or to inflict sickness;7 motifs of marching
and battle cries directly allude to the body, and striding, marching, and
trampling postures almost always accompany the raised arm.8 Human
warriors on earth mirror the divine warriors in heaven; authors easily con-
flate the two bodies, and one becomes a cipher for the other on earthly
and cosmic levels. In the Hebrew Bible, one of the clearest examples of
this conflation occurs in Psalm 89, the first third of which narrates God’s
eternal kingship in terms of ruling over the Sea, crushing enemies, the
mightiness of the arm, righteousness and justice, and so on, while the
middle third of the poem celebrates the king in parallel ways—his hand
set upon Sea/ River, defeating enemies, enjoying familial relationship
with the deity, and acting as the eternal king (i.e., David and his line).9 In
5. Joel LeMon, “Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Psalms,” in The Oxford Handbook
of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 377–91, here
385–86.
6. At least in the medium of metal figures; see Helga Seeden, The Standing Armed Figurines
in the Levant (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1980), v, 135.
7. E.g., the “arm of YHWH” in Isa 51:9; 53:1; and various “hand” references for battle and
sickness in Exod 9:3, 16:3; Josh 4:24, 22:31; Judg 2:15; 1 Sam 5:6, 9, 11; 7:13; 12:15; 2 Sam 24:14;
1 Kgs 18:46; Isa 51:17; 66:14; Ezek 3:14; Ps 81:15(14); 89:14(13); 118:15; Ruth 1:13.
8. In the corpus of poetry sometimes considered “archaic” see, e.g., the hand of the deity in
Exod 15:6, 12, 16; Hab 3:4; marching in Judg 5:4, 13; Ps 68:8(7); Deut 33:2–3; the “voice” as a
war instrument in Psalm 29; Ps 68:34(33); compare with Deut 5:25 and Isa 30:31; 66:6. The
classic study of this poetic corpus remains Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman,
Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; originally published in
1975 in the Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation series); see also Patrick D. Miller, The
Divine Warrior in Early Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1973), as well as Mark S.
Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), esp. chapter 2, “Yahweh and Baal.”
9. On these divine- human parallels, see Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical
Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 157–59; for other features, Richard J. Clifford, “Psalm 89: A Lament over the
Davidic Ruler’s Continued Failure,” HTR 73.1/2 (1980): 35–47.
001
Figure 4.1. Relief of Assurnasirpal II (ninth century bce); Assyria;

British Museum
iconographic form, an Assyrian relief of Assurnasirpal II at war depicts

the parallel in mirror-bodied form (Fig. 4.1):10 the king rides into battle in a
chariot, bow drawn and facing fiercely ahead, while flying above him, two-
dimensionally grazing the top of the king’s bow, the deity (Assur) faces the
same direction, the bow drawn, and poses in an identical posture.
Depictions of the divine warrior as well as humans in battle from the
environs of ancient Israel bear similarities—which I assume are genea-
logical in terms of their derivation in many cases—with antecedent ma-
terial from Egypt, Ugarit,11 and Mesopotamia generally, and take their
place in a long history of visualizing the hero. The bodies of Pharaoh and
the Mesopotamian king stand paradigmatically above the ancient Near
Eastern landscape of heroic images; the Narmer Palette and Naram-Sîn
Stele are instructive for considering the strong impulse to present the
10. George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 45–48.
11. For the textual parallels with the Ugaritic corpus, see especially Smith, Early History of God
and Origins of Biblical Monotheism.
0
11
Figure 4.2. The Narmer Palette; side A at left, side B at right; c. 3200–3000  bce
leading body in a particular manner. Narmer’s “smiting pose” (Fig. 4.2)—

the earliest clear example we have of this scene—would be repeated for
centuries as a royal warrior trope, applied to both deities and humans,
and ultimately it served as the central bodily pose for heroic activity in the
Levant.12 Whether presenting the viewer with a commemoration of a his-
torical narrative or a more abstract, idealized moment of royal power, the
towering figure with raised arm looms over the scene (side A).13 The main
body is upright, poised, even serene despite the active posture, while the
12. For major studies of this motif, see in particular two works by Izak Cornelius: The
Iconography of the Canaanite Gods Reshef and Ba’al: Late Bronze and Iron Age I Periods
(c 1500—1000 bce) (Fribourg: University Press, 1994), esp. 25–26, 91–102, 125–42, 168–80,
232–33, 255–59; and The Many Faces of the Goddess: The Iconography of the Syro-Palestinian
Goddess Anat, Astarte, Qedeshet, and Asherah c. 1500–1000 bce (Fribourg: Academic Press,
2004), esp. 21–43, 104–7, as well as Joel M. LeMon, “Yhwh’s Hand and the Iconography of the
Blow in Psalm 81:14–16,” JBL 132.4 (2013): 865–82 and sources cited there, reprised by Lemon
in “Masking the Blow: Psalm 81 and the Iconography of Divine Violence,” in Iconographic
Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: An Introduction to Its Method and Practice, ed.
Izaak J. de Hulster, Brent A. Strawn, and Ryan P. Bonfiglio (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2015), 281–94, as well as Dominique Collon, “The Smiting God: A Study of a
Bronze in the Pomerance Collection in New York,” Levant 4 (1972): 111–34.
13. The “idealized” (rather than historical) sense of the depiction seems more likely, though
the historical and the symbolic need not be entirely separate. Of many available analyses of
the piece, see Whitney Davis, Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Egyptian
021
Figure 4.3. The Hunter’s Palette; c. 3200–3000 bce
bodies of the defeated in the king’s left hand and then also in the lowest
register, beneath his feet, are contorted, smaller, and frantic. On the side
of the Palette opposite the striking king (side B), the enemy at the bottom
register cowers under a bull, perhaps an animal representation of the
king, while at the upper right rows of beheaded enemies lie stacked, their
heads between their legs.
Possibly earlier than the Narmer Palette, the so-called Hunter’s Palette
(Fig. 4.3) displays the canonical Egyptian image of the striking figure
profile in the form of hunters (pursuing a lion), demonstrating that the
striking image may have had its origin in a hunting context just as well as in
human-to-human battle. Here each character in profile wields a weapon—
axes, maces, bows and arrows, spears—and each body appears as basically
a duplicate of the others (despite small differences). Egyptologist Whitney
Davis interprets this “body of canonical image making” not as a real “phys-
ical body” of a person but rather a “corporate or social body, the body pol-
itic, the body under rule . . . embodying the metaphor for and narrative of
the institutions of the hunter’s or ruler’s mastery of nature.”14 The heroic
bodies in these earliest of Near Eastern image traditions, then, are by no
means “individuals” in the modern sense but rather signifiers for larger
corporate realities and the activities of violence that undergird the social
order. To be sure, to the present day, bodies are still strikingly patterned,
corporate, and symbolic of more than the “individual” person within the
Prehistoric Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 161–200, which I follow here;
see 198 on the question of fusing “symbolic” and “narrative” modes of representation.
14. Davis, Masking the Blow, 99; here drawing on his early work in The Canonical Tradition in
Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10–29, 36–37, 221–24.
013
depiction—a motif we have already begun to explore through our reading

of Judges in the previous chapter.
The creation of an “alluring body” was paramount for the representa-
tion of the king in ancient Mesopotamia from as early as the third millen-
nium bce. In her analysis of the Naram-Sîn Stele (Fig. 4.4), for example,
Irene Winter shows how the ruler’s body on the piece conforms to ideas
about how an “auspicious” figure appears—marked by an apotropaic neck-
bead, the full display of the ruler’s right side without defect (with refer-
ence to the crucial right/left dichotomy in omen texts), the fullest beard
on the stele (a token of a man’s baštu, “life force,” “vigor”), and a girdle
Figure 4.4. The Naram-Sîn stele; late fourth millennium bce

041
seductively displaying the buttock in profile.15 Significantly taller than all

other figures in the scene, his bodily preeminence dominates among other
male bodies—several of whom are contorted in pain and defeat (one even
falling, beneath him, completely upside-down).16 Winter assumes, fol-
lowing Piotr Steinkeller, that a robust Gilgamesh literature from the third
millennium formed a background to the Naram-Sîn image; the sculpting
of an alluring body in this way was part of an “honored heroic tradition”
from an early period.17
The body of Gilgamesh himself is a clear textual focal point in the
Gilgamesh Epic, and his allure plays an important role in the plot at the
scene of his rejection of Ishtar (leading to Enkidu’s death).18 Visual com-
mands and cues abound in the prologue of Tablet I (lines 1–28), as the nar-
rator commands us to “see” the city.19 The gaze then turns to Gilgamesh
himself (lines 29–62): “Surpassing all (other) kings, hero endowed with a
superb physique . . .” (I.29); Gilgameš so tall, perfect and terrible . . .” (I.37);
“[The goddess] Bēlet-ilī drew the shape of his body, [the god] Nudimmud
brought his form to perfection . . .” (I.49–50); “A triple cubit was his foot,
half a rod his leg. Six cubits was [his] stride. . . . His cheeks were bearded
like those of . . . the locks of his hair growing [thickly . . .] [As he grew up
he was perfect in [his] beauty, by human standards [he was] very hand-
some . . .” (I.56–62). Enkidu likewise possesses divine beauty: “You are
handsome, Enkidu, you are just like a god . . .” (I.207).
Artists frequently represented the heroic pair in scenes that appear to
depict the killing of Humbaba (though we cannot be certain that these
15. Irene J. Winter, “Sex, Rhetoric, and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of Naram-
Sîn of Agade,” in her On Art in the Ancient Near East, vol. 2: From the Third Millennium B.C.E.
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), 85–107, here 85–90. Similar comments could be made of other ancient
Near Eastern royal images; e.g., see Winter’s essay (in the same volume), “The Body of the
Able Ruler: Toward an Understanding of the Statues of Gudea,” 151–65. For the broader
context of Old Babylonian depictions, see Silvana di Paolo, “Visualizing War in the Old
Babylonian Period: Drama and Canon,” in Making Pictures of War: Realia et Imaginaria in
the Iconology of the Ancient Near East, ed. Laura Battini (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016), 29–36.
16. Winter also points to the height of the ruler as a defining feature in “The Body of the Able
Ruler,” 156. See also comments on the height of Saul in Chapter 5 of this book.
17. Piotr Steinkeller, “Early Semitic Literature and Third Millennium Seals with Mythological
Motifs,” QS 18 (1992): 243–75.
18. Discussed at points in Winter, “Sex,” 87–90.
19. The following translations are from Andrew George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh
Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
015
Figure 4.5. Two heroes killing a victim; Old Babylonian terra cotta plaque
images depict Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba specifically, or if they

do, whether the images depict scenes exactly inspired by extant versions
of the epic). The format of these scenes—figures in profile flanking a
central frontal image—became quite common as a heroic motif across
Mesopotamia, and artisans reproduced it with variations for centuries (see
Figs. 4.5 and 4.6).20 In many cases, as in the figures illustrated here, the
victim faces the viewer, unclothed, vulnerable, contorted or kneeling in
submission, while the heroes attack in profile, sometimes in the notable
“smiting” position, their bodies suspended in violent action.
Many more examples could be adduced, as martial scenes exhibiting
the warrior aspect of the “heroic” identity appear frequently from the
third millennium bce onward in the iconographic corpus of the region.21
The neo-Assyrians in particular produced many images of war and the
king, from lion hunts and torture scenes to vast panels of siege warfare
20. See many examples in Hans Ulrich Steymans (ed.), Gilgamesch: Ikonographie eines
Helden /Gilgamesh: Epic and Iconography (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010), esp. the essay
by Wilfred G. Lambert, “Gilgamesh in Literature and Art: The Second and First Millennia,”
91–112.
21. See the recent essays in Battini (ed.), Making Pictures of War, the overview of seals in
Ruth Mayer-Opificius, “War and Warfare on Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East,” in The
Iconography of Cylinder Seals, ed. Paul Taylor (London: Warburg Institute, 2006), 51–61, and
an overview of many materials with some iconographic discussion in Ilona Zsolnay (ed.),
Being a Man: Negotiating Ancient Constructs of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2017).
061
Figure 4.6. Two heroes killing a victim; Neo-Assyrian cylinder seal impression
and a variety of royal displays.22 Even though few distinct Assyrian bodily
forms seem replicated in the Iron Age iconographic corpus of the Levant,
Assyrian images are better candidates than some of the older (though per-
haps now more famous) images from earlier periods for having actually
been viewed by individuals in the eighth–seventh-century bce Levant, and
the influence of Assyrian military and royal imagery on the Hebrew Bible
has now been established from several fronts.23
Also relevant from the perspective of imperial encounter are the
Persians. On the terms of the “master of animals” motif and even more
generally, Mark Garrison contends that “in the Achaemenid period [c.
22. E.g., Mark B. Garrison, “The Heroic Encounter in the Visual Arts of Ancient Iraq and
Iran ca. 1000–500 BC,” in The Master of Animals in Old World Iconography, ed. Derek B.
Counts and Bettina Arnold (Budapest: Archaeolingua Alapítvány, 2010), 151–74, esp. 153–63;
Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Religion and Ideology in Assyria (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), esp. 219–
69; Paul Collins, “Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Violence: Warfare in Neo-Assyrian Art,” in
Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, ed. Brian A. Brown and Mirian H. Feldman
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 619–44; Irene Winter, “Royal Rhetoric and the Development of
Historical Narrative in Neo-Assyrian Reliefs,” 3–70, and “Art in Empire: The Royal Image
and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology,” 71–108, both in her On Art in the Ancient
Near East, vol. 1: Of the First Millennium B.C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
23. See Peter Machinist, “Assyria and Its Image in the First Isaiah,” JAOS 103.4 (1983): 719–
37, among many other contributions on this topic, as well as a more recent review in Jeremy
D. Smoak, “Assyrian Siege Warfare Imagery and the Background of a Biblical Curse,” in
Writing and Reading War: Rhetoric, Gender, and Ethics in Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed.
Brad E. Kelle and Frank Ritchel Ames (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 83–91.
017
522–331 bce] the theme of heroic encounter finds one of its richest ex-
pressions.”24 In particular, the many examples of the “royal hero” char-
acter in sculptures at Persepolis evoke notions of what Garrison, following
Margaret Root, calls a “Persian Man,” marked by a robust beard, one hand
grasping the head of an adversary animal, and the other ready with a dagger
to thrust into the animal.25 In sum, the broad Egyptian and Mesopotamian
contexts offered a basic heroic visual inheritance that ancient Israel could
not have avoided adopting.
The Iconography of Heroic Bodies in and

around Israel
Pictorial evidence in the form of seals, incisions, paintings, statues in
terracotta and metal, and other media provide evidence for the way he-
roic bodies were shaped and presented nearer to ancient Israel. Getting
within the historical and geographical boundaries of the Iron Age broadly
in “Israel,” specifically, not to mention drawing conclusions about dia-
chronic or regional variation, is not an easy task for any rigorous historical
reconstruction. Reasonable debate about the boundaries of Israel in any
given period and about the dating of particular objects will and must con-
tinue. Moreover, the relative dearth of certain kinds of anthropomorphic
male images (e.g., statuary) from Iron Age Israel complicates the task.26
Nevertheless we proceed with due caution where necessary but with an
eye toward glimpsing what images we may have.
Undoubtedly, the most common heroic-bodily pose for warrior ac-
tivity we find in the iconography is the “smiting god” or “striking war-
rior” motif,27 depicting an upright figure with upraised hand. Indeed, for
warrior characteristics, it is perhaps the only recognizable, widespread
iconographic motif—including variations, such as partially raised arms,
24. Garrison, “Heroic Encounter,” 164, and 163–68 on the Achaemenid iconography; see
also some examples, from within fourth-century bce Israel/Palestine, in Mary Joan Winn
Leith, Wadi Daliyeh I. The Wadi Daliyeh Seal Impressions; Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
24 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 209–28 and accompanying plates.
25. Garrison, “Heroic Encounter,” 165; Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in
Achaemenid Art. Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 303–7.
26. Discussion and sources cited in Brian R. Doak, Phoenician Aniconism in Its Mediterranean
and Ancient Near Eastern Contexts (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), 127–28, 131–32.
27. One major interpreter of these figures, Izak Cornelius, refers to the pose as “the men-
acing god”; Cornelius, Iconography of the Canaanite Gods, 255–56.
081
Figure 4.7. At left: front and side view, deity in “striking pose”; Megiddo; at
middle, the “Anatolian” type with two arms extended at hip; Byblos; at right: the
“Egyptian” type, with one arm extended at hip and other hand at side; Byblos
sitting or merely standing instead of striding, and so on.28 Middle and Late
Bronze Age examples in metal abound, though figures in this medium
persist into the early first millennium, and unlike other warrior images
in what Ora Negbi categorized as the “Anatolian pose” (by their resem-
blance to second-millennium lead figures from Anatolia)29 and “Egyptian
pose” (mostly from Byblos, with clear Egyptian influences from the early
second millennium),30 the striking figures are ubiquitous throughout
the ancient Near East as well as Anatolia, the Mediterranean, and even
southern Europe (Fig. 4.7).31 Aside from metal statues, the figures appear
on seals, plaques, pottery, and other media as well (Fig. 4.8). Though the
majority of these striking figures are male deities (many presumably Baal
or Resheph), several noteworthy examples of warrior females exhibit the
same qualities as the males (Figs. 4.9 and 4.10).32 Whether these deities
28. Though (with reference to LeMon, “Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Psalms”)
other variations and possibilities for heroic representation exist.
29. Ora Negbi, Canaanite Gods in Metal: An Archaeological Study of Ancient Syro-Palestinian
Figurines (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology, 1976), 8.
30. Negbi, Canaanite Gods, 21; see also Cornelius, Iconography of the Canaanite Gods, 50.
31. Negbi, Canaanite Gods, 29.
32. Cornelius, Many Faces, 20–29, 104–9; Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines,  26–35.
091
Figure 4.8. Striking figures on seals (three examples at left) and plaques (four
examples at right). The images here (from left to right) are from location unknown;
location unknown (possibly Phoenician); Beth-shan (Israel/Palestine); Minet el-
Beida (Syrian coast); Egypt; Deir el-Medina (Egypt); Zagazig (eastern Nile delta).
See captions in Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 158.
Figure 4.9. Seated goddess wielding axe and spear on throne; thirteenth–twelfth

century bce
are Astarte or Anat, or other unknown goddesses or possibly misidentified

males in some cases, is not always clear.33
In the stele format, probably the most famous example, the so-called
Baal stele from Late Bronze age Ugarit, features the deity in classic pose
(Fig. 4.11).34 He grasps a mace in the right hand, and with the left a sprouting
branch-spear, indicating the vegetative process with which he was associ-
ated. The smaller third hand protruding from the waist of the deity holds
a human figure, probably the king of Ugarit, indicating simultaneously
33. On this, see Aren M. Wilson-Wright, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a

Goddess in the Late Bronze Age (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016).
34. See other smaller stelae in Cornelius, Iconography of the Canaanite Gods, Pls. 1–20 for
Rehsef, 32–34 for Baal.
0
1
Figure 4.10. Anat or Astarte (?) on damaged stele; thirteenth–twelfth century bce
the close relationship between deity and ruler and marking their status
vis-à-vis one another, with Baal as the towering sponsor.35 A more recently
discovered tenth–ninth-century bce stele from a location near ancient Tell
Ahmar, pulled from the Euphrates in 1999 and published in 2006, joins
a group of similar Syro-Anatolian stelae depicting a “Storm God” in the
striking pose (Fig. 4.12).36 Both deities on these stelae, as in some of the
other second millennium examples in other media, sport long, stylized
curls of hair flowing down their backs and jutting out beneath the up-
raised arm, visually linking the striking motion with the hair—the hair
35. Mark S. Smith and Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 2: Introduction with Text,
Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT 1.3–1.4 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 20–21.
36. Guy Bunnens, A New Luwian Stele and the Cult of the Storm-God at Til Barsib-Masuwari.
With a Chapter by J. David Hawkins and a Contribution by Isabelle Leirens (Louvain/
Paris: Peeters, 2006).
111
Figure 4.11. Baal Stele from Ugarit; Late Bronze Age
may be a heroic feature in its own right, or at least a sign of virility and
luxuriance of appearance.37
In her study of these weapon-bearing figure types, Seeden character-
izes their sheer numbers in the Late Bronze Age Levant as “extraordinary,”
with their distribution pattern centered directly in this region.38 These
37. See examples of warrior hair in Susan Niditch, “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair
and Identity in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 35–39, and discussion
of another relevant piece of iconography (Fig. 3.1) in Chapter 3 of this book.
38. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, v, 132.
2
1
Figure 4.12. Tell Ahmar stele with Storm God and Luwian inscription; tenth–
ninth century bce
numbers immediately raise the question of function, as well as the var-

ious identities of the figures in the iconography. The location of so many
of the examples at cult sites indicates deities whose identity must have
been associated with warrior activity (e.g., Baal, Resheph, various “Storm
Gods”). Hunting, however, may also be indicated,39 and activities such as
herding, guarding, and political administration could overlap between
39. In his discussion of heroic culture, Smith, Poetic Heroes, e.g., 15–17, 27–33, 106–7, 113–22,
128–36, 173–75, 185–203, 325–26, repeatedly emphasizes hunting motifs.
13
Figure 4.13. Striking warrior figures from Megiddo: at left, bronze figure from
Late Bronze grave at Megiddo (13 cm), possibly Resheph; at center, painted ostracon
with bearded human warriors; at right, group of warriors from a zoomorphic clay
vessel (curved around neck of an animal)
humans and deities, as possibly shown by the helmets on the many Byblos
metal striking figures (deities) which, Seeden suggests, were the headgear
of “official urban personnel” (humans).40 So too the Ahmar stele (Fig. 4.12)
features a deity “dressed in a way that combines divine attributes with the
normal accoutrements of the early Iron Age ruling class.”41 Thus, the as-
sumed divine identity of many striking figures does not inhibit extended
identifications with humans. At a Megiddo burial site (Grave 4; presum-
ably MB–LB?), we find continuity between divine and human striking
motifs—a small (13 cm) bronze figure of a striking deity with a conical
headdress, grasping a mace or spear-like weapon in one hand and a small
shield in the other, but also painted sherds with distinctly human warriors,
bearded and without the conical helmet marking the so-called weather god
figures, grasping weapon and shield in a stance very similar to the posture
of the deity (Fig. 4.13).42
Keel and Uehlinger see a turn toward aggression in Late Bronze Age
depictions of the striking “weather god,” to the point that the once pre-
dominant female “fertility” figures fade into the background or disap-
pear completely in some cases.43 In addition to the striking motif, other
40. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 152.

41. Bunnens, A New Luwian Stele, 53, and other examples in Alberto R. W. Green, The
Storm-God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 154–65; Keel and
Uehlinger, Gods,  37–39.
42. Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, 53–60. They suggest (p. 60) that the bronze figure may “pos-
sibly” represent the Pharaoh, due to similarity between the headdress and the pharaonic
crown worn in Upper Egypt. See image in Gordon Loud, Megiddo II. Seasons of 1935–39.
Plates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
43. Keel and Uehlinger, Gods,  53–65.
4
1
Figure 4.14. At left: Pharaoh on chariot with bow in active warfare; at right: tri-

umphant Pharaoh with captive enemies (Tell el-Far’ah [south]); both c. thirteenth
century bce
symbols, such as the chariot, come to the fore, and Nineteenth-Dynasty

(thirteenth–twelfth-century bce) seals from Israel/Palestine begin to de-
pict Pharaoh in the act of battle—holding a bow and riding a chariot—for
the first time in this region.44 The active portrayal of battle also has its
counterpart, however: the triumph of victory, showing the warrior at rest
with the spoils of war, human enemies subdued (see both images in Fig.
4.14). Most famously, the post-battle heroic postures on the Late Bronze
Age Megiddo ivory show the king at rest on the throne, receiving the spoils
of war, including human prisoners led in by a chariot-riding warrior on the
far right (Fig. 4.15).45
Although the Late Bronze period saw the most intense production of
the warrior figures across media, especially the striking pose in metal, de-
pictions of warriors in action are by no means limited to the pre-Israelite
periods. A lion battle scene with other associated motifs from Gezer,
44. Othmar Keel, “Der Bogen als Herrshaftssymbol. Einige unveröffentlichte Skarabäen aus
Ägypten under Israel zum Thema ‘Jagd und Krieg,’ ” 27–65, and Menakhem Shuval, “A
Catalogue of Early Stamp Seals from Israel,” 67–162, here 88–91, both in Studien zu den
Stempelsiegeln aus Palästina/Israel, Band III: Die Frühe Eisenzeit, Ein Workshop, ed. Othmar
Keel, Menakhem Shuval, and Christoph Uehlinger (Fribourg: Academic Press, 1990).
45. Gordon Loud, The Megiddo Ivories (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939).
15
Figure 4.15. Ivory plaque with seated king, captives, and warrior on chariot;
Megiddo; Late Bronze Age
Figure 4.16. Incised image of figure battling lion; Gezer; mid-

first
millennium bce
possibly depicting a local Heracles figure according to Keel and Uehlinger

(Fig. 4.16),46 may be dated to the mid-first millennium bce, and a fifth-
century bce incised drawing from Tell el-Far’ah (south) shows three war-
riors with spears (Fig. 4.17).47
In short, the striking figure is ubiquitous across the ancient Near Eastern
world of the Middle–Late Bronze Age, and extending into the Iron Age—
in Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, west into the Mediterranean
world, and beyond. Texts from Israel, Ugarit, and elsewhere attest to its
recognizability in literary form, indicating wide familiarity for audiences.48
46. For much more on the lion imagery, see Brent A. Strawn, What Is Stronger than a Lion?
Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Fribourg: Academic
Press, 2005), esp. 152–87, 436–57 (figs.), as well as Leith, Wadi Daliyeh, 85–94 and accom-
panying plates.
47. Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, 380–82.
48. E.g., Brent A. Strawn, “‘With a Strong Hand and an Outstretched Arm’: On the Meaning(s)
of the Exodus Tradition(s),” in Iconographic Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: An
6
1
Figure 4.17. Three spear-wielding figures; Tell el-Far’ah (south); fifth century bce
The striking pose is our most recognizable and frequent heroic body, and
its iconography communicates to us on several fronts:
(1) The striking figure with arm raised is, in virtually every instance,
also a striding figure (or at least a standing figure), with a gaze focused
in the direction of attack. It is even possible that some of the three-
dimensional figures once stood (by way of tenons and socket) on an-
other object, now lost, such as an animal or in a shrine.49 At any rate,
the standing posture sets up a basic contrast between the activity of
the warrior and the rest of a seated figure.50 Moreover, in the metal ex-
amples from the Levant in the second millennium, these figures are in
many cases totally nude (sometimes with very distinct penises), and in
Introduction to Its Method and Practice, ed. Izaak J. de Hulster, Brent A. Strawn, and Ryan
P. Bonfiglio (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 103–16; LeMon, “Yhwh’s Hand.”
49. As noted by Collon, “Smiting God,” 129.
17
cases where the figure wears clothing, he is partially nude—with fully

exposed legs and arms, compared to seated figures, who wear clothing
down to the feet.51 The nudity could, as Seeden proposes, point up
“fertility” connotations, or it could highlight in a more raw form the
gender of the figure and his superhuman power.52
Thus there are multiple bodily emphases in these images: the upraised
arm, sometimes with weapon in hand, focuses attention upward, while
the gaze (sometimes expressionless either by design or by degradation
of the medium over time) focuses horizontally toward the enemy. The
hair styles vary; on seals, longer curled locks occur, but in statue form
(perhaps for practical reasons) the hair seems usually shorter or com-
pletely covered by a helmet.53 Two-dimensionally, the figures are univer-
sally depicted in profile while the three-dimensional examples at least
allow for full frontal postures. In profile, the striker may be viewed more
obviously as the aggressor in a scene, as an actor on a confined stage.
(2) In cases where the victim kneels or cowers before or beneath the
striker, the object of the blow also comes into primary focus. In the tra-
dition of the Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba scenes, the victim in
the middle stares outward, directly at the viewer, appearing totally vul-
nerable and helpless before the strikers (Figs. 4.5–6). In the Egyptian
examples following the Narmer Palette tradition (Fig. 4.2), the enemy
appears, and in many Mesopotamian scenes enemies lie trampled or
in the path of the bow and arrow (Figs. 4.1, 4.4, 4.14).
(3) However, in many examples no victim appears; thus the striking figure
presupposes another image, the receiver of the blow. Joel LeMon has
aptly spoken of this aspect of the striking figure in terms of “expecta-
tion”—the figure commands our gaze “in anticipation of the event,”
and captures an “endless moment in a drama of domination.”54
51. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 3, 133–34, 148–49. In fact, as Seeden points out (141), the
nude examples never occur on seals or stelae, despite the fact that the nude metal statues are
contemporary to these other media. See also Sarah Kielt Costello, “The Mesopotamian ‘Nude
Hero’: Context and Interpretations,” in The Master of Animals in Old World Iconography, ed.
Derek B. Counts and Bettina Arnold (Budapest: Archaeolingua Alapítvány, 2010), 25–35, and
selected examples in Leith, Wadi Daliyeh,  39–70.
53. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 142; compare with descriptions of curly-haired war-
riors in Niditch, My Brother Esau, 53–56,  59–61.
54. LeMon, “Yhwh’s Hand,” 877–78.
8
1
However, it is not always clear that this kinetic moment exactly en-
codes for viewers “the unsettling reality that the enemies are not yet
vanquished,” “suggesting violence that is never quite realized.”55 In
cases where the depiction (in text or iconography) offers historical nar-
rative, assuming it would be recognizable to the audience as such,
the violence has certainly been realized. One may compare the act of
viewing a poster of a sports hero, posed mid-action, about to score
or just having scored—the viewer is reminded of victory and power,
perhaps feeling pride, but probably not really flush with anxiety about
future scoring opportunities. All of this depends very much on the
context of viewing, however, as viewers commemorate victory in the
past never just for its own sake. In cases of active conflict, or in texts
rife with unrealized expectation (such as Psalm 81, in LeMon’s anal-
ysis), even victory in the past cannot fully quell the anxiety of hopes
yet to be accomplished. In this analysis, then, the body would encode
significant anxiety about the future and the community.
(4) Overwhelmingly it is the male figure represented in these statues, re-
flecting the traditional role of the man in battle. Female striking fig-
ures, though rare, do exist (Figs. 4.9–10). In many cases the female
figures bear weapons, and in metal they seem to be from an earlier
period in the late third millennium–early second millennium bce.56
Heroic Burials and Warrior Weaponry

As a corollary to the depiction of the body in iconography, let us also con-
sider two other examples of the materiality of heroic existence: (1) the
so-called warrior burial phenomenon, acknowledging that it pre-dates bib-
lical Israel by many centuries, and even though “warrior” traits are not
exclusively “heroic” (though they are a significant part of that definition);
(2) weaponry associated with the warrior culture of the Levant.
Graham Philip defined a “warrior burial” by the presence of weapons,
especially particular kinds of weapons and objects that comprised a
“structural unity” of burials in a pattern across the Levant, Mesopotamia,
and Cyprus in the Middle Bronze period (the first half of the second
55. LeMon, “Yhwh’s Hand,” 877–78.

56. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines,  26–35.
9
1
millennium bce):57 fenestrated axes,58 spearheads, daggers, and a specific

type of metal belt (see Fig. 4.18).59 Indeed, as Mark Smith suggests (fol-
lowing an analysis by Gordon Hamilton), weapons with cross-purposes in
hunting and warfare such as the throw-stick, axe, mace, and bow served
as models for the earliest pictographic alphabet. In these images we find a
“basic lexicon of weaponry,” exhibiting the world of warriors and weapons
in a commonly used format that would endure pictographically for cen-
turies (insofar as users understood the pictographic significance of the
letters).60 The symbolism of the warrior was common. Garfinkel points
out that in two prominent sites where the warrior burials occur, Baghouz
and Gesher, around 25 percent of all male burials in the cemeteries are of
the “warrior” type. Rather than positing a large separate “class” of warriors,
these statistics may suggest that many adult males carried weapons, and
the fact that these weapons were valuable (made of bronze) yet still put out
of use via burial suggests they were personal property of the deceased.61
In the warrior burials, the axe most often appears placed by the head
of the individual with other weapons by the feet or back (Fig. 4.19). Philip
sees these burials not as isolated or idiosyncratic practices but rather as
part of a much broader ancient Near Eastern pattern, a postmortem treat-
ment that would have been recognizable for a long period of time. The
burials do drop off considerably, however, at the Late Bronze period (the
57. See the earlier study of Eliezer D. Oren, “A Middle Bronze Age I Warrior Tomb at Beth
Shan,” ZDPV 87 (1971): 109–39, and then the more recent updates on the second millen-
nium phenomenon in the Levant by Graham Philip, “Warrior Burials in the Ancient Near-
Eastern Bronze Age: The Evidence from Mesopotamia, Western Iran and Syria-Palestine,”
in The Archaeology of Death in the Ancient Near East, ed. Stuart Campbell and Anthony
Green (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1995), 140–54; Yosef Garfinkel, “Warrior Burial Customs in
the Levant during the Early Second Millennium B.C.,” in Studies in the Archaeology of Israel
and Neighboring Lands in Memory of Douglas L. Esse, ed. Samuel R. Wolff (Chicago: Oriental
Institute, 2001), 143–61.
58. On this axe in particular related to the warrior burials, see Garfinkel, “Warrior Burial
Customs.”
59. Philip, “Warrior Burials,” 142–43, 145–46.
60. Smith, Poetic Heroes, 30–31; Gordon J. Hamilton, The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet
in Egyptian Scripts (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2006), 312–15.
61. Garfinkel, “Warrior Burial Customs,” 155, 157. In an analysis of ninth-century bce burials
in central Adriatic Italy, Amalia Faustoferri (“Women in a Warrior’s Society,” in Burial and
Social Change in First-Millennium BC Italy: Approaching Social Agents: Gender, Personhood and
Marginality, ed. Elisa Perego and Rafael Scopascasa [Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016], 97–110,
here 99) assumes that “warrior” type burials featuring weapons indicated that only these
“few men had the privilege of ‘taking’ these weapons with them to the grave, as they ‘em-
barked’ on their last journey.”
201
Figure 4.18. Typical set of warrior weaponry from Middle Bronze Age “warrior
burial”; Tell Rehov
last few centuries of the second millennium), raising the question of how
recognizable these heroic-body treatments would have been during the
later Iron Age.62
In his analysis of these burials at Gesher, Baghouz, Rehov, and Kabri,
Yosef Garfinkel sees a threefold pattern in the treatment of the corpse: (1)
the bodies are primary burials, that is, the bones are set in their normal an-
atomical position, suggesting there was no re-interment or arrangement
62. On the decline, see Philip, “Warrior Burials,” 145, 153–54.

2
11
Figure 4.19. Middle Bronze warrior burial from Gesher (grave 13) with axe and
spearhead
of the corpse after the initial burial; (2) the position is flexed, with knees
drawn up and legs folded (see Fig. 4.20 in an artist’s reconstruction and
Fig. 4.19); (3) the burials are all (with one exception) individual—only one
person is interred in the tomb.63 Moreover, of the thirteen burials Garfinkel
surveys, one axe appears every time (in twelve out of thirteen cases it is the
“duck bill” axe), and ten out of thirteen cases featured one or more spear-
heads.64 Due to the placement near the head in nearly every case, Garfinkel
reasonably suggests the corpse was buried grasping the axe.65
Notwithstanding the problem of knowing whether these buried bodies
were truly “heroic” as warriors, leaders, or founding figures—perhaps they
were elite individuals in some sense, or their burial weapons indicated
a real or hoped-for identity—these burials suggest that bodies associated
with valuable weaponry were treated in special ways. Assuming the hand
of the deceased grasped the axe in burial, the position could mimic the
long-standing visual motif of the striking figure, arm raised with weapon
aloft, as a fixed bodily reality in the tomb. These burials help suggest that
63. Garfinkel, “Warrior Burial Customs,” 153.

221
Figure 4.20. Artist’s reconstruction of warrior burial from Kabri (Western

Galilee)
the significance of the heroic body was not only a literary feature of an im-
agined heroic culture but also a lived experience.66
Weapons associated with warrior culture gesture toward the materi-
ality of the heroic body and the world they inhabited. To be sure, because
warriors were so closely identified with their implements, the weapons
become “extra-somatic body parts” in their own right, melded with the
bodies of their owners.67 In this respect, perhaps more literally, we may
recall the battle exploit of one of king David’s mighty men in 2 Samuel
23, Eleazar son of Dodo son of Ahohi, who struck down Philistines to the
66. Compare with Smith, Poetic Heroes, 33, remarking on his collected examples of warrior
and hunting iconography, weaponry, and other materials related to battle vis-à-vis biblical
texts: “The artifactual material may suggest that pre-and post-battle practices are not simply
literary constructions imagined by their authors. Rather, these practices were apparently
grounded in the ancient societies that produced and transmitted the texts that represent
them, even if the texts may elaborate what was the cultural reality.”
67. See Smith, Poetic Heroes, 17, citing Fernando Santos-Granero, “Introduction: Amerindian
Constructional Views of the World,” in The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories
of Materiality and Personhood, ed. Fernando Santos-Granero (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2009), 1–29, here 14; for use of the phrase “extra-somatic body parts,” Santos-Granero
refers to an essay in the same volume by Philippe Erikson, “Obedient Things: Reflections on
the Matis Theory of Materiality,” 173–91.
213
point of exhaustion though his hand, perhaps frozen from prolonged grip,
“clung/stuck (davaq) to the sword” (v. 10). In armed-figure representations
from the Levant and elsewhere, mostly from the second millennium, the
fenestrated axe is most prominent (see example in Figs. 4.18 and 4.19), fol-
lowed by lances, daggers, swords, and shields.68 Wooden objects are much
rarer, though the fourth-millennium “Cave of the Warrior” near Jericho
featured a nicely preserved wooden bow along with arrow shafts, as well as
a flint knife and a smaller blade.69 A Phoenician “family tomb” at Achziv
from the tenth century bce revealed a sizable quantity of iron weapons, in-
cluding one burial of an “important warrior” with dozens of arrowheads as
well as a full sword, a double-edged axe, and other implements.70 Parallel
materials from Rosh Zayit during the same time period may indicate the
common distribution of these kinds of weapons.71
Conclusion: Displaying the Body
Though warriors are not the sole exemplars of “heroic” culture in a given
society, the iconography and other material culture of the ancient Near
East broadly and the Levant specifically indicate a pronounced concern to
display heroic bodies in particular ways—most frequently, as discussed
in this chapter, in the striking pose. As victorious king or warrior, seated
postures and post-battle processions also appear, indicating traditional
practices and the alternating turns between combat and rest. The striking
image encodes a number of visual possibilities, clearly focusing on the
kinetic activity of the arm or hand and often showcasing an alluring torso
on full display for the viewer. On the whole, however, within the bound-
aries of what could reasonably be called “Israel” in the Iron Age (at least
on a generous consideration), we do not find an abundance of heroic male
bodies in the iconographic record. Perhaps the lack of such figures can be
attributed to the supposed lack of male figures in general from Israel—the
68. Seeden, Standing Armed Figurines, 143, and 142–45 for a review of all weapons appearing
in the three-dimensional representations; see also Sariel Shalev, Swords and Daggers in Late
Bronze Age Canaan (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004).
69. Tamar Schick, et al., The Cave of the Warrior: A Fourth Millennium Burial in the Judean
Desert (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 1998), 30–33, 45–53, 59–62.
70. Published in Eliat Mazar, The Phoenician Family Tomb N.1 at the Northern Cemetery of
Achziv (10th– 6th centuries bce) (Barcelona: Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona,
2004), 117–25.
71. Mazar, Phoenician Family Tomb, 117.
241
search for a clear cult image of YHWH continues, though it is not clear
that Israel lacked material male images beyond what we find or should
expect from surrounding territories of its size (e.g., Philistia, Moab, Aram,
etc.). Textual representations are at least less amenable to idolatrous ven-
eration and leave the reader free to imagine any number of possible visu-
alizations without demanding any one of them the way a material image
might. Even so, canonical forms such as the striking warrior ensured a
reasonably uniform visual index over long periods of time by which new
visualizations were formed.
215
The Height of Saul and

the Beauty of David
Where Are the Bodies of Israel’s Kings?

The narrative descriptions of Israel’s kings throughout 1–2 Samuel, 1–2
Kings, 1–2 Chronicles, and all of the prophetic books dealing with the
monarchy should be a prime location for exploring the bodies of the fa-
mous men who rule over first the “united monarchy” and then in the di-
vided kingdom. As the locus of national desire and stability, the king is
a primary “heroic” figure, one whose bodily features, success, and skill
would propel the nation to righteousness and victory.
As it turns out, however, the vast majority of these kings have no body
as far as the text is concerned. Solomon has no body of significance.1 The
great rulers of the northern kingdom, such as Jeroboam, Omri, Ahab, and
many others are not attractive or tall or physically ugly (even though they
are morally ugly in the Deuteronomistic assessment), or physically strong,
or physically anything. The righteous reformer Hezekiah possesses no
beauty that would attract us to him, and has no particular appearance at all
(though he does get sick at one point; 2 Kgs 20:1–11). Josiah is a complete
ghost. These figures loom large in the tradition. Why is it, then, that only
Saul and David receive physical description, and indeed, by biblical stand-
ards, elaborate descriptions at that? Perhaps part of the answer lies in the
framing of their stories, particularly our introduction to the characters: By
the time the narration turns toward the later kings, or even Solomon, the
1. At least in the narrative of 1 Kings—he may have a body in Song of Songs; see Jonathan
Kaplan, My Perfect One: Typology and Early Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–53.
261
storytellers are through with the kind of narrative buildups that feature
bodily descriptions. In 1–2 Samuel, the narrator seems to have all the time
in the world for such things, providing details that seem to be of only
antiquarian interest, relics of bygone political maneuvering possibly even
dating back to the life of David and Saul themselves.2
The lack of specific bodily description does not, of course, preclude the
presence of a “conceptual body” of a different kind, a presumed body that
moves about and conveys a host of values. Accessing this “body” proves
elusive, though it is possible and fruitful depending on the frame of the
discussion—for example, considering the king’s body at work as a builder
of cities and temples, the body as receiver of crowns and displayed in mean-
ingful symbolic spaces, or the royal body in times of sickness.3 However,
these “bodies” of the king run the risk of simply melding into a discussion
of the king as a “self,” or the king as “king,” or any other conceptual cat-
egory. If the text does not explicitly describe the king’s arm’s straining to
lift the cornerstone of a temple into place, and detail his weariness and
fainting legs after such acts, and so on, signaling to us a direct narrative
concern with the physical body as opposed to some other emphasis, in what
sense should we be talking about the king’s “body,” exactly, as a builder?4
2. The question of whether Israel’s “united monarchy” (and subsequent division) was a his-
torical reality or a legendary ideal period of unity that in fact never existed has been the
subject of decades of debate but plays no role in my analysis here—except that I will rely
on this biblical concept of a “united monarchy,” particularly under Saul and David, as a
period of creative memory-making and heroic imagination. For the historical issue, see,
e.g., Lester L. Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, rev. ed.
(London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017), 138–58, and Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar,
The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, edited by
Brian B. Schmidt (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007). On Saul and David, generally, I follow analyses
like that of Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), which, while far from naïve regarding historicity, argue for a
basic and meaningful historical core to these narratives.
3. These are all specific categories (in addition to others) considered by Mark W. Hamilton in
The Body Royal: The Social Poetics of Kingship in Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
4. See Chapter 1 in this book for more on this problem. Hamilton, Body, 10–12, struggles
with this same issue, but does not, for my sensibility, adequately address it. In some of the
cases where actual bodies explicitly appear in the narrative, Hamilton has surprisingly little
to say (e.g., Body, 120–21 on Saul, and 208, insightfully, on Absalom and David in a narrative
beauty contest; but see some expanded comments on Saul’s body in Mark W. Hamilton, “The
Creation of Saul’s Royal Body,” in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha
C. White [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006], 139–55). For another study dealing with these
“background” or “implied” issues of the royal body, see also Mark K. George, “Assuming
the Body of the Heir Apparent: David’s Lament,” in Biblical Limits: Reading Bibles, Writing
Bodies: Identity and the Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David Gunn (London: Routledge,
2002), 164–74.
217
Height of Saul, Beauty of David 127
Clearly, at any rate, there are frames of reference for bodily analysis be-
yond the specific literary descriptions of bodies, so the point here is not to
exclude those frames. Indeed, they are quite significant for understanding
the specific literary descriptions. Consider Isa 6:1 as a brief case in point.
In the year of king Uzziah’s death: a final bodily failure of a powerful figure
who reigned for decades in relatively prosperity, thus signaling entry into
a time of uncertainty and change. I saw the Lord seated upon a throne, high
and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple: the prophet now sees
the divine body, contrasted to the tiny body of the frail king, in a cosmi-
cally dominant position, towering so high that the mere hem of his robe
fills the entire temple space. Concepts of actual bodies (a gesture toward
Uzziah’s corpse, the Lord as a looming giant) interact with emotional and
political registers to create an elaborate display of bodies.
Outside of Saul and David, however, in the broader landscape of
Samuel-Kings, precious few bodies appear, truly positioning Saul head and
shoulders above the crowd and David as the ideal monarchic body over the
short-lived united kingdom. Various references here and there do occur,
mostly of the common type: Hannah has a “closed womb” (1 Sam 1:5–6);
the narrator alludes to the prophet Samuel’s hair through the Nazirite ded-
ication (1 Sam 1:11); Eli’s eyes grow dim (1 Sam 3:2; 4:15), and he is “heavy”
(1 Sam 4:18); ears that hear stunning news will tingle (1 Sam 3:11); a statue
of Dagon bows, with hands cut off, before the ark of God (1 Sam 4:3–4); the
Lord’s “hand” of plague or judgment rests heavy upon the Philistines and
others (1 Sam 5:6, 9; 7:13; 12:15; 2 Sam 24:14) or as prophetic inspiration
(1 Kgs 18:46; 2 Kgs 3:15); people contract tumors or other bodily diseases
(1 Sam 5:10; 2 Kgs 5:27); an oppressing king gouges out the eyes of certain
Israelites;5 Samuel has gray hair, is old, and wears a robe (1 Sam 12:2; 28:14;
compare with Joab’s “gray head” in 2 Kgs 2:6, 9); the Philistines are “un-
circumcised” (e.g., 1 Sam 14:6, 17:26; 1 Sam 31:4//1 Chr 10:4; 2 Sam 1:20); a
severed head is tossed over a wall as part of a negotiation (2 Sam 20:22);
the Lord trains a warrior’s hands for war (2 Sam 22:25); a hand withers
(1 Kgs 13:4); a prophet heals a boy through an intense bodily ritual (2 Kgs
4:34–35); Jezebel paints her eyes (2 Kgs 9:30), and later her body is mauled
beyond recognition (2 Kgs 9:35); the Babylonians gouge out the eyes of
Israel’s last king, Zedekiah (2 Kgs 25:7).
5. Between 1 Sam 10:27 and 11:2, in the recovered portion not in the MT but present in
4QSama.
281
In many instances, throughout Samuel-Kings generally, it is not merely

the case that bodies are not described; often shadowy characters emerge out
of a complete void, say or do things, and then disappear. Almost no phys-
ical details of any kind appear. An anonymous “man of God,” hailing from
nowhere, appears and says things in 1 Sam 2:27–36. God himself “stands”
next to the boy Samuel in 1 Sam 3:10 and delivers a message—whether the
physical appearance of the deity is glorious or humble, simple or ornate, or
anthropomorphic beyond what we might imagine necessary for a being to
“stand,” we have no idea. Despite their major role (by moral incompetence)
for prompting the people to ask for a king, Samuel’s sons merit no special
description beyond their names (1 Sam 8:1–3)—they are not blind, nor ugly,
nor deceptively attractive. Other examples could be adduced from Samuel-
Kings, most of them also not particularly “heroic” in their orientation, even
under the broad definition of the heroic phenomenon I have been using
throughout this study.
Thus, the more ornate bodily descriptions for Saul and David in these
texts mark them with a specific kind of attention. More recent studies have
begun to read these characters—particularly David—under the rubric of
“masculinity studies,” which often evokes the body and includes many
other facets of what constitutes gender and the thicker social context of
men and women in texts and media of all kinds. In one of the first studies
to pursue this type of analysis, published in 1995, David Clines fore-
grounded a discussion of David as a biblical male by appeal to work done
in sociology, psychology, and pop-culture analysis up to that time, focusing
on the “scripts” that men perform and the cultural determinations of man-
hood across space and time.6 Turning to the David narratives, Clines iden-
tifies qualities such as fighting prowess, intelligence, and male friendship
bonding as some key aspects of the mythical Israelite male, and, most
significantly for our purpose here, bodily beauty, a true “aspect of ‘real
manhood’ ” in these narratives.7 Indeed, David engages in a male beauty
competition with Saul and Absalom, all competing in various ways to
6. David J. A. Clines, “David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew
Bible,” in his Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible
(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 212–43. For an update and amplification of
Cline’s views, with added nuance and at points corrections, see Stephen M. Wilson, Making
Men: The Male Coming-of-Age Theme in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015),  29–46.
7. Clines, “David,” 223.
291
capture the political and emotional attention of the people around them.8
This consideration of the male ruler as an alluring exemplar of his gender
is not only a contemporary concern, but also a stock feature of political
ideologies from some of our earliest sources in the ancient Near East.9
Other studies have now joined in this analysis of David as an arche-
typal biblical man, and Saul, too, has justifiably begun to receive attention
on this front.10 All of this is quite fitting, since Saul and David partici-
pate in a rather complex “body drama” in 1 Samuel that scholars have not
yet analyzed with enough depth in its bodily dimensions, especially given
the pervasiveness of body themes both explicitly and subtly interwoven
throughout the narratives.11 In my reading of the bodies of Israel’s first
series of leaders, in Judges (Chapter 3 of this book), I argued that the in-
dividually torn and violent bodies signaled a larger social body. Indeed,
the Hebrew Bible’s presentation of one of its first most significant bodies,
that of Jacob/Israel in Genesis, also points in several directions toward
the relationship between an individual body (Jacob) and the national body
(Israel) (see Chapter 2 of this book). Here too, I continue to see individual
bodies reflected back into the corporate body, and vice versa, though for
David and Saul the process seems more ambiguous, complicated by the
rollercoaster of affairs that characterize the national body through the
reigns of both men: moments of strength and unity, undermined, recon-
ciled, undermined again, valorous, cowardly, bold, and hidden.
8. Hamilton, Body Royal, 208.

9. Irene J. Winter, “Sex, Rhetoric, and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of Naram-
Sîn of Agade,” in her On Art in the Ancient Near East, vol. 2: From the Third Millennium B.C.E.
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), 85–107, and some comments in Mark Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary
Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 87, 94.
10. E.g., Wilson, Making Men, 34–36; Marcel V. Măcelaru, “Saul in the Company of Men: (De)
Constructing Masculinity in 1 Samuel 9–31,” in Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded, ed. by
Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix, 2014), 51–68; Stuart
Macwilliam, “Ideologies of Male Beauty and the Hebrew Bible,” BI 17.3 (2009): 265–87; and
new essays from a variety of contexts in Ilona Zsolnay (ed.), Being a Man: Negotiating Ancient
Constructs of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2017).
11. An exception here: Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature
and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 355–64.
301
The Heroic Body of Saul

The narratives of 1 Samuel engage with the body of Saul to a significant de-
gree, much more deeply than most interpreters notice. In this examination,
I trace key moments of Saul’s body-drama, beginning with his physical de-
scription in 1 Samuel 9, a passage that launches our consideration of em-
bodiment in provocative ways. However, unlike almost all other analyses of
Saul’s body, I then go on to show how this bodily narrative engagement con-
tinues right up until Saul’s death—indeed, beyond it—and plays a vital role
for telling the story of Saul’s monarchy.
Tall Body
Though mentioned only briefly in our first introduction to him, Saul’s notable
height plays a crucial role for our understanding of his ultimately ambiguous
status as a leader and strikes resonant, simultaneous themes indicating both
chosenness for leadership in a long ancient Near Eastern tradition and also,
perhaps distinctively for ancient Israel in its environment, themes of arro-
gance and opposition to the deity.
Now there was a man from Benjamin, and his name was Qish, son of
Ariel son of Zeror son of Bechorat son of Aphiach, a Benjamite man,
a valorous warrior (gibbor chayil). He had a son, his name Saul, strap-
ping (bachur) and tov, and there was no one more tov than him among
all the Israelites. From his shoulders upward, he was taller than all the
people. (1 Sam 9:1–2)
The use of a quite generic term, tov (“good, pleasant, right”),12 to describe
Saul twice in the passage does not clearly demarcate him as “physically
attractive” or “handsome,” as most translations have it.13 I render the word
bachur, “young man,” here as “strapping” in order to capture something
of both the sense that he is young, perhaps on the cusp of marriageable
age (compare with Isa 65:2) or even just old enough to fight in battle (Jer
12. I. Höver-Johag, “ṭôb,” TDOT 5 (1986): 296–317.

13. E.g., P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 173; Hans Wilhelm
Hertzberg, I & II Samuel: A Commentary, trans. J. S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1964), 75; but cf. Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), 80, “a fine young
man. None of the Israelites was better than he,” and also Sternberg, Poetics, 355.
131
50:30, 51:3)—not still a mere child, but not yet a full-grown “man.”14 Paired
with tov, bachur indicates something of Saul’s heartiness and vigor in a
positive sense.
Though Kyle McCarter justifiably compares Saul to a list of Israelite
heroes identified by their good looks (Joseph in Gen 39:6; David in 1 Sam
16:12; Esther in Esth 2:7; and Moses in Exod 2:2),15 more elaborate terms
pertain to these other heroes: Joseph as yepheh-to’ar wipheh mar’eh, “hand-
some in form and appearance,” David as admoni im-yepheh eynayim wetov
ro’i, “ruddy (?), with shapely eyes and a good (tov) appearance,” Esther as
yephat-to’ar wetovat mar’eh, “beautiful in form and a good (tov) appearance.”
Although tov appears commonly paired with yapheh and other markers of
physical beauty in these cases, yapheh clearly stands on its own as a phys-
ical descriptor (most frequently not paired with or qualified by tov in any
way).16 Moses alone within this list compares directly to Saul regarding the
isolated use of tov: “The woman bore a son, and she saw him, that he was
tov, so she hid him” (Exod 2:2). In this context for Moses, translators more
commonly render tov somewhat ambiguously (but appropriately) as “fine”
(e.g., NRSV), leaving open the possibility that we do not see the baby as
“physically attractive” but rather as embodying some quality as “good”—
perhaps mystically perceived by his mother, perhaps by way of physical
health, weight, or some other sign of robustness. Thus, in 1 Sam 9:2, we
would better understand tov as something like “fine” or (quite awkwardly,
in English) “notable in a positive sense,” both translations being the appro-
priate shade more ambiguous than one that would smooth the matter over
with the very specific and probably more satisfying adjective “handsome.”
Saul is, in any case, the tovest of all Israelites. It is difficult to imagine him
as unattractive, though the text does not specify any of this necessarily.17
14. Note 1 Sam 13:1–3, where we have a notorious text-critical corruption for recounting Saul’s
age and reign length (Klein, 1 Samuel, 86).
15. McCarter, Samuel, 173.
16. E.g., Gen 12:11, 14; 41:2; Deut 2:11; 1 Sam 25:3; 2 Sam 13:1; 14:25; 1 Kgs 1:3; Amos 8:13; Job
42:15; Prov 11:22; and around a dozen times throughout Songs. Notably, in Songs—a book
replete with terms for physical features and attractiveness—tov occurs only thrice (1:2; 4:10;
7:9), never along with physical description.
17. Compare with Măcelaru, “Saul,” 57–58, and Macwilliam, “Ideologies,” 277–78; Robert P.
Gordon, I and II Samuel: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986), 112. Wilson,
Making Men, 34–35, worthily considers reading tov here as “imposing,” paired with the height
description. Cf. Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Winona Lake,
IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), who suggests Saul is “gangly” in the baggage scene, and Athalya
Brenner’s The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and “Sexuality” in the Hebrew
321
Saul’s physicality takes an even more enigmatic turn, however, with

the final feature of his body: “From his shoulders upward, he was taller
than all the people.” The main interpretive trajectory here reads height
in a basically unqualified sense: He is to be a strong warrior, in line with
his father the gibbor hayil,18 and his height marks him as the clear heroic
body for Israel to choose for the tasks at hand. And there is much to rec-
ommend this interpretation. On a most basic, literal level, nothing in the
immediate context suggests anything problematic about the height. His
status as head and shoulders above others coheres with the valor of his
father and with the qualifiers bachur and tov. Indeed, one presumably so
young towering above others to that extent—and we are talking about no
small height difference here19—must be marked for some kind of great-
ness, for other kinds of towering (moral, military, leaderly, etc.). Key ex-
amples from the iconography of kingship in Egypt and Mesopotamia
suggest that superior height signals the king’s prominence. Scenes repre-
senting the Pharaoh have him rising to heights two or three times as tall as
his vanquished foes,20 while royal depictions of Naram-Sin and others also
feature unnaturally large height as a quality not only of dominant rulers
but also of deities.21 Irene Winter documents pertinent examples, in visual
form and in texts over a long time period, in which we find the exhortation
to “see” the ruler, including an account of subjects literally looking to the
Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 51, who suggests that good/tov and beautiful/yapheh should be
considered in terms of “semantic interchangeability.”
18. McCarter, Samuel, 173, prefers to see the phrase gibbor hayil more in its connotations of
“social standing” and “economic power,” valences here that may blend together with war-
rior concerns. For this exact phrase in other contexts, mostly involving warfare, see Judg 11:1
(Jephthah); 1 Sam 16:18 (David); 1 Kgs 11:28 (for Jeroboam, with a meaning not clearly “heroic”
or “warrior” in orientation); 2 Kgs 5:1; Ruth 2:1; Neh 11:14; and nearly two dozen times in 1–2
Chronicles. For the heroic resonances of this term and its development in the Hebrew Bible
beginning in Genesis, see Brian R. Doak, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in
the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2012), 53–70.
19. I.e., if the average human head is around 9'' tall, and Saul is “head and shoulders” taller
than everyone, then reading the image literally (within the world of the narrative) would in-
dicate Saul is perhaps a foot (or more) taller than his contemporaries.
20. Examples in Othmar Keel, “Kanaanäische Sühneriten auf ägyptischen Tempelreliefs,”
VT 25.2 (1975): 413–69, here 419, 421, 427, 440, 446, 448.
21. See discussion of the Naram-Sin stele in Chapter 4 of this book, as well as Doak, Rephaim,
13–16, for other examples.
313
king for perfection at every level, including height: “the people of the land
stared at his tall, perfect . . . princely body.”22
Contemporary United States presidential heights tell a similar story: since
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency (1933–1945) up to the current time (2019),
encompassing a total of fourteen presidents, only five have been shorter than
six feet tall (three of those measuring within only one-half–one inch shorter
than six feet), with five measuring at or above six feet two inches—all this
when the average US male height was around five feet nine or five feet ten
inches during the same several decades.23 Clearly height offers measurable
advantages for a leader in the eyes of the public—even if only on a primal,
evolutionary level.
The fact that Saul alone receives this height characterization among
the Bible’s many leaders, however, haunts any easy assumption about the
straightforwardly positive assessment of his physical status.24 On specifi-
cally biblical terms, as a bodily characteristic height is dangerous and pol-
yvalent. Considered one way, true, we have the clear and perhaps even
natural associations with height and leadership prowess. However, if un-
checked, large bodies become grotesque, embodiments of arrogance, over-
reach, and even cosmic monstrosity and all that the “monster” could entail
in its body. These over-large bodies—we could call them “giants”—are also
cultural bodies, ever signaling other bodies and sociocultural realities in
their context.25 The Hebrew Bible contains numerous engagements with
giant bodies and height metaphors more broadly, all of which offer an
overwhelmingly consistent message about these bodies—and it is not
positive.26 Ancient Israelite authors did not like tall things. Already in
22. Winter, “Alluring Body,” 97. The text is from a first-millennium bce bilingual inscription.
23. Gregg R. Murray and J. David Schmitz, “Caveman Politics: Evolutionary Leadership
Preferences and Physical Stature,” SSQ 92.5 (2011): 1215–35.
24. See Măcelaru, “Saul,” 57–58, who also compares Saul’s height to the invocation of height
in the Goliath episode (as I do also) and considers the possibility that the reference to Saul’s
height at least partially indicts him.
25. Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students
and Readers, ed. Clive Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 198–216, here
198–99.
26. See Brian R. Doak, “The Giant in a Thousand Years: Tracing Narratives of Gigantism in
the Hebrew Bible and Beyond,” in Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan: Contexts,
Traditions, and Influences, ed. Matthew Goff, Loren Stuckenbruck, and Enrico Morano
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 13–32, and also Doak, Rephaim, passim. A full treatment
of the height-and-vertical-ascension-as-arrogance-and-wickedness metaphor in the Hebrew
Bible has yet to be written, but examples are numerous; consider the Tower of Babel story,
341
Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2, as Robert Polzin translates it, Hannah cries

out (2:3), “Do not multiply your words, ‘Tall! Tall!’ ” (gebohah gebohah),27
and verses 6–8 of her song resound with height and descent metaphors.
The perfunctory denial that Saul was an “actual giant” fails to consider the
rich symbolism of large bodies and tall things in this literature that can be
meaningfully grouped together under this rubric of the “giant.” Given the
fact that Saul’s career ends in tragedy, shot through with repeated stories
berating him for disobedience, spiritual or psychological problems (the
“evil spirit from God” in 1 Sam 16:14–16; 23; 18:10; 19:9), mania, religious
infractions, and all sorts of other instability, his height must be considered
holistically as a premonition, a signal of his downfall.28 This signal em-
bodies a trap, because, in the usual assessment a tall body is a leaderly
body, a warrior body, and a successful body.
In fact, Saul’s heroic status as a warrior comes across strongly enough,
initially. In his first show of military strength, Saul rises up to crush the
Ammonites, rallying the new nation to a great victory (1 Sam 11:1–13).
However, the story introduces strong echoes of an earlier tale and its
Gileadite geography, in Judges 19–20, where the acts of cutting up a body,
sending its pieces throughout the land, and the subsequent threat of divi-
sion characterize a nation in the throes of complete anarchy and leaderless
chaos. The invocation of Saul’s Benjamite lineage in 1 Sam 9:1—indeed,
possibly a twofold identification, one of which might be superfluous for
a basic identification29—draws us again back to Judges and its drama of
Benjamites and left-handers, suggesting an intentional set of connections
meant to draw Saul’s violent victory into (negative) comparison with the
examples of nature overgrowth in Isaiah 2, 10:33–34, Ezekiel 17 and 19, Zech 11:2, among
other examples, and the motifs of an arrogant “assault on heaven” by rising up too high in
Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, and Job 20:6 (compare with Obadiah, vv. 1–4).
27. Robert Polzin, Samuel and the Deuteronomist. A Literary Study of the Deuteronomistic
History. Part Two. 1 Samuel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 34.
28. Sternberg, Poetics, 359, avers that Saul’s height eventually becomes “an established me-
tonymy for worthlessness and inglorious fate.”
29. The second reference could be emphasizing that Aphiach was “a Benjamite man,” or
perhaps the author resumes the description, “a Benjamite man,” a second time to get the
reader back on track after the first reference to “a man from Benjamin” at the start of the
verse because of the string of ancestors going three generations back (i.e., it is a miniature
form of Wiederaufnahme). Cf. Hertzberg, Samuel, 80, who claims that the ancestor list in 1
Sam 9:1 intentionally means to indicate “a good and respected family.”
315
violence in Judges.30 In 1 Sam 14:47–48, we learn that Saul “did valiantly

(chayil),” following in the tradition of his father the gibbor chayil, defeating
all surrounding enemies. Even this description, though, comes at an odd
place, sandwiched between accounts of his failures, making the victory
seem anticlimactic, awkward, or at the very least, complicated.31
The sheer fact that the narrator physically describes Saul as part of our
introduction to him bears considerable weight as an interpretive feature
of the story. In this introduction, particularly relating to Saul’s height, our
narrator offers a subtle variation on the ancient Near Eastern genre of
physiognomy—a pseudo-scientific “reading” of bodies (often animal body
parts, but sometimes bodily behavior and human bodies) in search of in-
formation about future events.32 Such traditions were explicitly adopted
in early Judaism, where we find tradents of the Qumran community en-
gaging in combinations of physiognomic and zodiacal traditions.33 As
Zainab Bahrani argues in a review of this way of thinking, reading bodies
constitutes a “complex, multilayered hermeneutics,” a pervasive type of
mantic thinking in the ancient world. What we see in the Hebrew Bible
on this front, when we see bodily features drawn into inextricable rela-
tionship with a character’s fate, flaws, or achievements, is a type of narra-
tive physiognomy. In his body, already, we find that Saul’s heroic identity
comes pre-packaged in an attractive format—but with soon-to-be-revealed
traps for the unwary viewer, perhaps thus simultaneously, along with its
gesture toward physiognomy, offering an anti-physiognomic critique in
the same stroke.
30. See comments on this in Chapters 3 and 6 of this book, as well as Suzie Park, “Left-
Handed Benjamites and the Shadow of Saul,” JBL 134.4 (2015): 701–20, who elaborates many
aspects of this comparison between Judges and the reign of Saul.
31. Of course, source-critical issues may explain the potentially awkward placement of this
pericope at some original level, but cf. Serge Frolov, “The Semiotics of Covert Action in 1
Samuel 9–10,” JSOT 31.4 (2007): 429–50, who sees coherence through 1 Samuel 9–12 and
on into chs. 13 and 14 as well.
32. Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (New York: Zone
Books, 2008), 91–99.
33. E.g., Mladen Popović, Reading the Human Body: Physiognomics and Astrology in the Dead
Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic–Early Roman Period Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
361
Hidden Body, Frenzied Body

The story of the missing donkeys and Saul’s search for them in 1 Sam
9:3–10:27 has long bedeviled readers.34 Following directly on the physical
description and involving the search for lost animals, a seemingly awk-
ward encounter with a prophet, a mantic frenzy, an attempt to hide among
“baggage,” and the eventual public proclamation of Saul as king, the story
ends with a resumed note on Saul’s height (10:23), thus forming a bodily
inclusio around the drama and asking us to think about Saul’s status on
bodily terms. Why tell this prolonged story, though, and why tell it in this
way? Interpreters pursue many different strands of analysis here, for ex-
ample, debating the problem of sources in 1 Samuel 9 and 10, seeing two
sources here in tension with one another, now stitched together with the
seams all too obvious, or detecting broader themes of kingship and the-
ology within the broader Deuteronomistic History within which these
stories play a role.35 A turn to literary and theological concerns appropri-
ately tries to make sense of the minute details in the narrative. Hertzberg
emphasizes the special “delight” and “warmth” suffusing the narrative,
reflecting, in his view, a real historical connection between Samuel and
Saul. McCarter reads the piece as a tale of “self-discovery,” as the audience
realizes, alongside Saul, step by step, that his election has not occurred
by mere chance and the collusion of random, mundane details but rather
is the result of “the providential direction of the entire adventure” to find
the asses.36 Others, however, see the tale as a diversion—Brueggemann,
for example, claims that “the narrative . . . has no real interest in the story
34. For commentaries, see, e.g., McCarter, Samuel, 164– 96; Klein, Samuel, 80–109;
Hertzberg, Samuel, 75– 90; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Louisville,
KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 70–82; and also the translation with notes by Robert Alter,
The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999). For essays dealing with themes relevant to my analysis here, see Jeffrey L. Cooley,
“The Story of Saul’s Election (1 Samuel 9–10) in the Light of Mantic Practice in Ancient
Iraq,” JBL 130.2 (2011): 247–61; Frolov, “Semiotics”; and on a more programmatic level (and
helpfully reviewing older scholarship), Mark Leuchter, “The Rhetoric of Convention: The
Foundational Saul Narratives (1 Samuel 9–11) Reconsidered,” JRH 40.1 (2016): 3–19.
35. In review of the historical-critical assessments, see esp. Cooley, “Story,” 247–49, and on
the story’s broader significance vis-à-vis the so-called “Deuteronomistic History,” Leuchter,
“Rhetoric” and Marsha White, “‘The History of Saul’s Rise’: Saulide State Propaganda in 1
Samuel 1–14,” in “A Wise and Discerning Mind”: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long, ed. Saul M.
Olyan and Robert C. Culley (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 271–92.
36. McCarter, Samuel, 185.
317
of the asses” and that it “is only a convenient entry point in the real story
concerning the monarchy.”37
Taking for granted many dimensions of meaning and avenues for
exploration of all kinds in 1 Samuel 9–10, we ask, in light of our focus
here: What meaning might these enigmatic chapters have for our theme
of the heroic body? My contention is that we see a series of bodily mo-
tifs, beginning in chapters 9–10 and then unfolding throughout 1 Samuel,
involving alternating scenes of hiddenness, disclosure, smallness, and
misrecognition. These bodily cues and miscues present Saul in an ambig-
uous light, and then, once they begin to involve David, his royal supplanter
and successor, present Saul as a bodily failure.38 The fact that Saul’s body
continues to haunt David well after Saul is dead, however, combined with
David’s repeated need to manipulate Saul’s body and other bodies in stra-
tegic ways, shows us that dealing with even a “failed” heroic body is no
easy task.
Scene One: Small and Desirable (1 Samuel 9:3–26)

The lost donkeys already present hiddenness as a driving narrative force—
they are a valuable asset, and significantly it is Saul whom Qish sends to
find them. As Saul seeks the animals, the prophet seeks him. The ani-
mals mystically lead Saul to Samuel, and the prophet receives divine di-
rection and then seizes upon the moment, expecting things to go exactly
as they have (1 Sam 9:15–18). The moment at which the donkeys have been
“found” (matsa) occurs at the same moment Samuel finds Saul (9:20),39
and the conversation now takes the critical turn: “Upon whom is the de-
sire (chemdah) of all Israel—is it not upon you, and on all the house of
your father?”
This language of desire in 1 Sam 9:20—particularly chemed/chemdah—
reverberates throughout the Hebrew Bible in situations of mostly illicit
attraction, or at least desire tinged with the power of sinful allure and the
potential for “coveting” things like beautiful women and men, attractive
37. Brueggemann, Samuel, 71.
38. See also Polzin, Samuel, 138 on this (the “narrator show[s]‌us Saul progressively, al-
most obsessively hiding himself”), and on the fundamental ambiguity of Saul as a
character, Yairah Amit, “The Delicate Balance in the Image of Saul and Its Place in the
Deuteronomistic History,” in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C.
White (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 71–79.
39. On matsa, “find,” as a key word in this text, see White, “Saul’s Rise,” 285–86.
381
idols, gold, and silver.40 Physical appearances create desire in the majority
of these cases. This desire, for the biblical authors, is largely dangerous,
and indeed there are exceedingly few passages where chemed indicates a
desire uncomplicated by a looming threat or an outright sin (e.g., Songs
2:3; Ps 68:17[16]). The people’s decision to request a king does in fact con-
stitute idolatry, insofar as they select a human over God (1 Sam 8:7–8),
with YHWH very quickly and directly comparing the situation at hand
to that of the Exodus—the people are “forsaking me and serving other
gods.” The desire that Samuel expresses, then, functions like Saul’s great
height: working on two levels, such a thing seems good but proves a
problem later.41 Moreover, the desire can only, at least by implication, al-
lude to Saul’s physicality, because this is all we are allowed to know about
him at this point in the story: tov, and very tall.
Saul’s response to Samuel in 9:21 pulls the discussion in another
direction—presumably saturated in real humility—invoking the smallness
of his tribe and family group: “Am I not a Benjamite, from the smallest
(qatan) tribe of Israel, and my clan the least (sa’ir) of all the clans of the
tribes of Benjamin?”42 Is Saul tall, or tiny? And in what ways?43 By pointing
to his very first words as a character in the story, in 9:6, “Come, let us
turn back (shuv),” Robert Alter avers that a “general principle of biblical
narrative” is that “the first reported speech of a character is a defining mo-
ment of characterization.”44 Here too, in terms of the bodily symbolism
of tall and small, Saul has already gone back and forth. He rises up but
shrinks away.
40. E.g., Gen 2:9; 3:6; Exod 20:17; Deut 7:25; Josh 7:21; Isa 1:29; 44:9 (and compare with Isa
53:2); Ezek 23:6; 23:12; 23:23; Amos 5:11; Mic 2:2; Prov 6:25. See review in Gerhard Wallis,
“chāmadh,” TDOT 4 (1980): 452–61, here 456, who finds the “positive” uses of this term to
be “surprisingly small.”
41. On this dynamic for bodily beauty, see Sternberg, Poetics, 362.
42. See the recent assessment of this tribe by Benjamin D. Giffone, ‘Sit At My Right
Hand’: The Chronicler’s Portrait of the Tribe of Benjamin in the Social Context of Yehud
(London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), esp. 105–18 on Saul in this context.
43. Compare with Thomas R. Preston, “The Heroism of Saul: Patterns of Meaning in the
Narrative of the Early Kingship,” JSOT 24 (1982): 27–46, here 31: “Saul’s sense of his own
lowliness, his own un-worthiness, becomes a mental block that prevents him from psycho-
logically ever becoming a king. . . . Saul remains basically a farm boy who accepts the king-
ship only very reluctantly.”
44. Alter, David Story, 47.
391
Scene Two: Anointed and Frenzied (1 Samuel 9:27–10:16)

Samuel now anoints Saul and kisses him, intimate physical gestures that
come with the double announcement: he will be king, and the donkeys
have been found (1 Sam 10:2). Samuel announces various other meetings
and appointments Saul must have, none more striking than that Saul will
encounter a prophetic band and fall into a “prophetic frenzy” (first pre-
dicted in 10:5–6, then narrated in 10:9–13).45 Combined with the “other
heart” (lev acher) God gives to the new king (10:9), we might assume, as
some have, that the prophetic moment marks Saul in a positive sense.
In this moment, he becomes a servant of the Lord, like Samuel, and fit
for battle (particularly in 1 Samuel 10, when the overall narrative assess-
ment still seems positive).46 If his very heart has been changed, then he is
a new person, perhaps even with a new body of some kind. The physical
effects and display of this “prophecy” remain open to question, though
we have reason to think Saul’s body presents itself in these moments in
very distinctive ways.47 He cannot return home until after the prophetic
moment has ended (10:13); the prophecy, uniquely for Saul among uses of
the term nava/hitnabbe, occurs thrice paired with an “evil spirit from God”
descending upon the king and violently provoking him. The violent surge
in 11:5–11 comes on the heels of the prophesying, in 18:10 the spirit and
the prophesying occur together, and the extended scene in 19:18–24 links
the spirit problem with prophesying and then, in its most specific bodily
manifestation, to nudity (the evil spirit has no direct connection to proph-
esying, however, in 16:14–23).
Cognate sources in the ancient Near East attest to the bodily expressions
of a “prophetic frenzy” or wild behavior. Within the second-millennium
bce Mari corpus of prophetic texts, an ecstatic prophet (muḫḫû[m]‌, “one
who raves”) eats a live sheep,48 and within the Hebrew Bible, scenes such
45. See Christophe Nihan, “Saul among the Prophets (1 Sam 10:10–12 and 19:18–24). The
Reworking of Saul’s Figure in the Context of the Debate on ‘Charismatic Prophecy’ in the
Persian Era,” 88–118, and Gregory Mobley, “Glimpses of Heroic Saul,” 80–87, esp. 85–87,
both in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2006).
46. Leuchter, “Saul,” 8–9, and David M. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a
Biblical Story (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 61.
47. Măcelaru, “Saul,” 58–59.
48. J. J. M. Roberts, “The Mari Prophetic Texts in Transliteration and English Translation,”
in his The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Collected Essays (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
2002), 157–253, letter #39.
401
as 1 Kgs 22:10–12 narrate intense prophetic activity involving extrava-

gant bodily movements and props (compare with Jer 28:10–11, as well as
Hos 9:7 and Jer 29:24–28, associating prophets with “insane” behavior
[meshuga]).49
Others, however, have pointed to the later accounts of the prophesying,
in 1 Sam 18:10–16 and 19:18–25, as the determinative moments. Here we re-
alize the “prophecy” for what it is—a curse, not a gift.50 Further, in Matthew
Michael’s words, the narrative forms an “ideological dialogue” between
Saul’s climactic encounter with the witch at Endor in 1 Samuel 28 and the
earlier chapters of his introduction in 1 Samuel 9–10, among other places.
In light of the Endor encounter, Saul’s prophetic moments can now be
read as presenting Saul as a prototype of Israel’s cultic failures leading to
the ultimate downfall of the nation.51 My own reading hews more toward
those in this latter camp, who see Saul’s first prophetic moment—however
pure in its putatively independent form—as now clearly integrated with a
patterned downfall, leading to Saul’s negative presentation vis-à-vis David
and to his own death. Having said that, Saul’s body cannot be merely one-
dimensional; the narrative offers Saul’s heroic body to us, as we will con-
tinue to see, as something of a two-imaged hologram, that is to say, a body
that can be viewed in paradoxically different ways depending on the angle
of vision.
Scene Three: Hiding in the Baggage (1 Samuel 10:17–11:13)

The public selection of Saul as king at Mizpah takes a notable turn, as
Samuel now openly confronts the people again about their request for a
monarchy—a direct rejection of God (1 Sam 10:19; recall 8:7–8). In this se-
lection event, Saul ascends to the throne by lot. The public character of the
49. As noted by Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, revised and enlarged
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 28, although the verb for prophesy, nava, ap-
pears in the Saul stories as hitnabbe/mitnabbe, i.e., in the hitpael stem, which often indicates
repeated or intense behavior, there is no clear division between the niphal and hitpael for this
verb. Saul clearly engages in some bodily mania in these texts while in other places the hitpael
is used for presumably “normal” prophetic speech (1 Kgs 22:8; Ezek 37:10). For the issue
of ecstatic prophecy in the ancient Near East, see Martti Nissinen, Ancient Prophecy: Near
Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 171–200, and
also on the terminology and ecstatic prophecy, Nihan, “Saul,” 97–101.
50. Mobley, “Heroic Saul,” 86.
51. Matthew Michael, “The Prophet, the Witch and the Ghost: Understanding the Parody of
Saul as a ‘Prophet’ and the Purpose of Endor in the Deuteronomistic History,” JSOT 38.3
(2014): 315–46, passim, quote here at 318.
4
11
event is clear, even if not feasible; Samuel brings “all the tribes of Israel” to
himself, and the lots winnow down the candidates until only Saul should
be left. But he is missing. At this point, the hiddenness/visibility motif
makes perhaps its strangest appearance:
So they asked YHWH again, “Is the man still here?” YHWH said,
“Look—he has hidden himself among the kelim (‘baggage’?).”52 So
they ran and took him from there. He took his stand in the midst of
the people, and he was taller than all the people from his shoulders
upward. (1 Sam 10:22–23)
The resumption of Saul’s height description now brings his entire physi-
cality into a new light. The young man comes off as extraordinarily timid,
reluctant, and perhaps even comically unfit for leadership. The one who,
though tall, proclaimed himself “small” (from the “smallest tribe”; 1 Sam
9:21), still stands head and shoulders above the group but attempts to hide
from them. If we were to read Saul’s plea that his tribe is so “small” in re-
sponse to Samuel’s announcement that he would be king as a (positive)
mark of humility, and thus fitness to lead, are we now to read of Saul’s
hiding from the election process at Mizpah as an appropriate demurral as
well?53 Hardly; rather than highlight his wonderful qualifications for the
royal job, the hidden body—paired immediately with the second descrip-
tion of his extraordinary height—asks us to see Saul’s height shrinking
away. That is to say, what first appeared as uncomplicated and grand now
heads in another direction.
Now again in 1 Sam 11:14–15 at Gilgal, we read of another coronation.
How is this related to the previous accounts?54 Perhaps the repeated
scenes indicate an editorial struggle or they serve a literary purpose to
elaborate a movement from private to public revelations of Saul’s rule,55 or
they mimic ancient Near Eastern mantic conventions requiring multiple
confirmations of a divine decision.56 Whatever the case, a reiteration of the
52. Perhaps equipment, weapons, cultic implements, or utensils of some kind (Hertzberg,

Samuel, 89; McCarter, Samuel, 193).
53. As does Hamilton, Body Royal, 121.
54. See brief consideration in Hamilton, Body Royal, 120, as well as Cooley, “Saul’s Election.”
55. Alter, David Story,  63–64.
56. Cooley, “Saul’s Election.”
421
hiddenness motif appears in 11:5, when Saul first learns of the Ammonite
oppression—against which he will rise victorious and finally achieve a fully
public kingship (at the Gilgal coronation scene): “Now Saul was coming
back from the field, following the oxen . . .” Why is he at home, doing
farmwork, instead of leading the nation? Perhaps here again, we are to see
Saul sympathetically. He is a “humble farmboy,” only willing to take power
when absolutely necessary.57 Alternatively, invoking again the notion that
the narrative permits (or encourages) us to see Saul’s body two-sidedly,
we may see him here again in the act of hiding, shrinking back from the
public into a domestic scene. Saul is not even leading the oxen, let alone
the people of Israel. On this theme, consider the hiding of the Israelite
army in 1 Sam 13:6 and Saul’s army (led by Jonathan) as perceived in battle
by the Philistines in 1 Sam 14:11 (“The Philistines said, ‘Look, the Hebrews
are coming out from the holes in which they’ve hidden themselves’ ”) as
well as Jonathan’s absence from the military roll call in 14:17 (recalling
Saul’s absence at the election roll call in 1 Samuel 10).
Scene Four: Small in His Own Eyes (1 Samuel 15:17)

A summary of Saul’s victories in 1 Sam 14:47–48 straightforwardly praises
the king for his valiant action against all enemies around Israel, along with
a re-naming of Saul’s father (Qish; 1 Sam 14:51), provoking suspicion of du-
plicated or overlapping accounts in the history of the text’s composition.
The motif of smallness now comes back again to a climax in 1 Samuel 15,
as YHWH and Samuel most formally reject Saul. Saul violates the cherem
command against the Amalekites, prompting YHWH’s regret at making
him king in the first place (15:10), for he has “turned back” (shuv; recall 1 Sam
9:6). Samuel’s indictment of Saul resumes the smallness theme, drawing
the height versus hiddenness interplay to its tragic conclusion: “You are
little (qaton) in your own eyes, but are you not the head of the tribes of
Israel?” (1 Sam 15:17). Saul’s claim to smallness here turns out to be the
opposite of what Samuel or YHWH were looking for, as if his height and
military power should have continued to propel him to carry out violent
acts against enemies. Instead, Samuel interprets the failure to finalize the
killing as smallness, a violation against what both his ideologically royal and
personally physical body should have empowered him to do.
57. Preston, “Heroism of Saul,” 32.

413
Further Scenes: Hiding, Disguising, Cutting, and Other Displays

Broadening the scope to roughly the second half of 1 Samuel, many more
scenes come into focus in which hiding and disguises play prominent
roles, ending in Saul’s death in battle against the Philistines. Indeed,
hiding—primarily expressed through the root chaba, but also satar and
kachad— occurs more frequently in the narratives involving Saul and
David, primarily in the core stretch of narrative in 1 Samuel 10–26, than
for any other character or in any other discrete book in the Hebrew Bible.58
Jonathan hides in 1 Sam 19:2, then hides again in 1 Samuel 20; David hides
in 1 Sam 23:23, and takes refuge in a cave in 1 Sam 22:1; and the motif
comes to a pathos-laden end in 1 Samuel 28, when Saul disguises himself
for the Endor medium—the king cannot hide from Samuel, risen from
the dead for a brief moment to recognize Saul one final time and predict
his death.59 Readers are now prepared to see earlier incidents of shrinking
back and hiddenness (1 Samuel 9–10) in light of this final moment of
disguise.60 Saul comes to the prophet shrinking away, but the prophet
finds him.
Saul’s royal body, then, has a beginning both auspicious and inauspi-
cious, aptly encoding the overall narrative tone about him—chosen and
unchosen, successful and defeated, touched by God and abandoned by
God. Outside of the initial story in 1 Samuel 9–10, the narrator positions
Saul’s body in various other royal postures of significance, all of which can
be connected to the themes of visibility and hiddenness that we have been
tracing so far. In 1 Sam 20:24–28, the bodily positions at the new moon
feast highlight David’s absence:
. . . David hid himself in the field. When the new moon arrived, the
king sat at the feast (lechem, “food”) to eat. The king sat at his seat
(moshav), as he usually did, upon the seat by the wall. Jonathan rose
up (wayyaqom; or: “stood”?), and Abner sat beside Saul—but David’s
place was empty.
58. See 1 Sam 3:17, 10:22, 13:6, 14:11, 14:22, 19:2, 20:2, 23:19, 23:23, 26:1. Along with many other
features of the Samuel stories, the David and Saul “hiding drama” has been completely elim-
inated in Chronicles.
59. On the motif of hiddenness or concealment in 1 Samuel 28, see Brian Britt, “Prophetic
Concealment in a Biblical Type Scene,” CBQ 64.1 (2002): 37–58, esp. 53.
60. Michael, “Prophet,” 328–31.
441
Why not simply write: “Now David was absent from his place at the feast, so
Saul asked Jonathan . . .”? The bodily significance here is not completely clear,
yet the narrator goes to some effort to describe the scene.61 David’s absence,
of course, had come as the result of fear that Saul would kill him, a drama that
had been well in motion by this point in the story and would continue after
this scene as well. Saul’s royal position appears again in 1 Sam 22:6, as he sits
in a royal display under a tree, spear in hand, with servants in attendance—a
scene paired with the question of David’s location and the charge of treachery
against his rival (compare 22:7–8 with 20:30–34). These royal bodily displays
paint Saul unfavorably in a sense, since by this point (i.e., after 1 Samuel
16) we know David will rise to rule. David’s absence during the royal feast
and other military ventures—if on better terms he would have presumably
remained Saul’s armor-bearer—signals the loaded potential of the new royal
body that would come.
The report of the Amalekite in 2 Sam 1:6–10 has Saul perform one last
bodily act—the details of which do not appear in the narrator’s account in 1
Samuel 31:62
I chanced to be on Mount Gilboa, and Saul was there, leaning (sha’an)

on his spear. . . . He said to me, “Stand over me, and kill me—for
deathly agony (shavats) has gripped me, yet I still have breath in me.”
So I stood over him and killed him. . . . I took the crown that was
upon his head and the bracelet from upon his arm, and I have brought
them here.
61. Compare with Hamilton, “Saul’s Royal Body,” 145, who analyzes the theme of the king at
a meal in the context of 1 Sam 9:22–24—Saul’s position “at the head of the table” (v. 22) fore-
shadows his coming position as king. Paired with the “reluctance” theme, which Hamilton
connects with other scenes of prophetic demurral in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Exodus 3, Isaiah
6, Jeremiah 1, and 1 Samuel 3), the text not only “underscores Saul’s modesty,” as Hamilton
puts it, but offers, vis-à-vis his royal position of prominence at the head of the table, another
juxtaposition between visibility and hiddenness in this narrative.
62. The question of the Amalekite’s motives and the veracity of his story is a famous problem.
I proceed with the assumption that the Amalekite is telling an opportunistic lie, but really
did (on the terms of the story) find Saul dead, and thus hoped to use the encounter and the
items he stripped as a way to score prestige with David.
415
Saul’s spear, with him in his final moment, served as his signature
weapon,63 appearing many times in the narrative (1 Sam 18:10–11; 19:9–10;
20:33; 22:6; 26:7–22) and experiencing its own drama of physical prom-
inence and hiddenness— thrown from Saul’s hand to kill David, and
at Saul’s side as a token of his battle prowess even when Israel lacked
weapons, including spears specifically, in the earlier conflict with the
Philistines (13:19; 22). The spear was also the principal weapon of Goliath,
overwhelming Saul and his army (17:7). As an “extra-somatic body part,”
the spear melds with Saul’s body as part of his identity.64 Thus, when David
steals Saul’s spear in 1 Sam 26:11–12, he symbolically cuts off a piece of
Saul’s body, a process that began with the tearing of Saul’s robe, first by
Samuel in 15:27–28 and then by David in 24:4 (compare with 1 Kgs 11:29–
32, and Jonathan’s stripping off the robe and giving it to David in 1 Sam
18:4),65 tragically calling attention back to Saul’s dismemberment of the
oxen in 11:7. Before the Goliath battle in 1 Sam 17:38–39, Saul takes off his
own armor and puts it on David, a stunning move. Even the “spirit of
YHWH,” once rushing upon Saul like the Judges of old, gets lost to David
(16:14–14), replaced instead for Saul with an “evil spirit.” This process of
taking items from Saul is, of course, at the broadest level a symbol of Saul
losing the kingship to David. On the level of the heroic body, specifically, it
is as though Saul’s very body gets chipped off and given away, one piece at
a time, until there is nothing left.
Perhaps, as Victor Matthews suggests, the final view of Saul leaning
upon his spear in 2 Sam 1:6 is one last bit of defiance, a “lone figure bowed
over his spear” dying a painful heroic death in battle.66 Standing on the
63. Mobley, “Heroic Saul,” 83–84; cf. Hamilton, Body Royal, 197, who sees Saul’s spear in
these texts as ironic—he should be a great warrior and the spear a marker of a great warrior,
but instead the weapon is deployed in the service of madness and associated with failure.
64. See discussion of the heroic weapon in this role in Chapter 4 of this book, with reference
to Smith, Poetic Heroes, 17, and Samuel A. Meier, “The Sword. From Saul to David,” in Saul
in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2006), 156–74, for a systematic review of Saul’s weaponry.
65. On this, see Măcelaru, “Saul,” 59, who points to nudity and the loss of clothing as elem-
ents of Saul’s shame in the narrative; George, “Assuming the Body,” 170, who argues that in
1 Sam 18:4 “Jonathan steps out of his skin and disembodies himself”; and also Hertzberg,
Samuel, 155: “Clothing especially is so much a part of the person who wears it that the giving
of it to another person is equivalent to giving away one’s own self.”
66. Victor H. Matthews, “Making Your Point: The Use of Gestures in Ancient Israel,” BTB
42.1 (2012): 18–29, here 19; cf. Alter, David Story, 196: “From Saul’s words in verse 9, what
this [leaning on the spear] means is not that he was resting but that he was entirely spent,
barely able to stand.”
461
mountain, near death, Saul’s body stands tall one final time. And in this re-
port passage in 2 Sam 1:6–10, Saul still possesses the spear, still the armlet,
still the crown—but the Amalekite strips these, too, standing “over him”
(a bodily posture repeated twice), as now even an anonymous Amalekite
can loom over the fallen once-tall king. His body now seems fully gone.
However, significantly—and uniquely among Israel’s kings—Saul’s body
continues to act after his death, through the power of his bones.67 Bone
discovery, transfer, and manipulation represent a significant heroic motif
in their own right, and I analyze it in Chapter 6 of this book.
Interlude: Goliath’s Giant Body
The towering body of Goliath is one of the most domineering and end-
lessly fascinating anti-heroic bodies in the Hebrew Bible.68 In the biblical
imagination, the giant is the embodiment of that which is anti-God, anti-
order, anti-Israel, and anti-monarchy. In many ancient literatures, through
the medieval period in the West as well as into the contemporary world
(through various figures in the horror genre), the giant plays a funda-
mental role of the “other,” defying cultural norms, speaking arrogantly,
over-eating, and taking up too much space.69 Some have suggested that
the Goliath episode in 1 Samuel 17 connects Saul to the giant Philistine in
blatant and subtle ways70—beginning with the fact that the two individuals
are brought into direct conflict, and readers can hardly forget, having been
told of Goliath’s great height, that Saul himself towered above his contem-
poraries. In the Masoretic Text of 1 Sam 17:4, Goliath’s traditional height
67. Brian R. Doak, “The Fate and Power of Heroic Bones and the Politics of Bone Transfer
in Ancient Israel and Greece,” HTR 106.2 (2013): 201–16, and also Doak, Rephaim, 12, 64,
190–95.
68. See Doak, Rephaim, 101–15, for analysis of the Goliath scene, from which the following
materials in this “Interlude” section are adapted. Note that Goliath is joined in 2 Sam 21:15–
22, 1 Chr 11:22–25, 20:4–8 by several other gigantic or unusual bodies that David and his
men confront.
69. Doak, Rephaim, 2–6; and comments about the giant as “other” in Walter Stephens,
Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska, 1989), 58, and Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 86.
70. E.g., Rachelle Gilmour, Representing the Past: A Literary Analysis of Narrative Historiography
in the Book of Samuel (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 239–41, who points to the connection between
characters who seem outwardly impressive but in fact are “inwardly weak,” as well as the fact
that both Saul and Goliath are both tall and wear armor.
417
measures 9'6'' tall (roughly converted to the English system, assuming

an 18'' cubit and a 9'' span), though text critics are (correctly) quick to
point out that the majority of ancient Greek texts as well as Josephus (in
Ant. VI.171) and the archaic 4QSama scroll from Qumran all have him at
6'9''—considerably shorter, and possibly, strange as it may be to imagine,
not much taller than we are asked to imagine the head-and-shoulders-
taller Saul.71
The nature of Goliath’s weaponry may reveal real historical memories
of Philistine warriors in the early Iron Age, but this is accidental to the pur-
pose of the narrator.72 The description of armor, like Goliath’s body, is ide-
ological: it is about power, and the frightening quality of the monster. His
gear, in addition to his size, is meant to invoke an aura of overconfidence
that comes as the result of reliance on brute force alone. Perhaps the most
poignant example of this comes in 1 Sam 17:5–7, where specific weights
for the scaled body armor and spearhead are provided. As with Goliath’s
height, the measurements here are less than exact, but the 5,000 shekel
(= 125 pounds?) armor and the 600-shekel (15 pounds?) spearhead invoke
nothing less than terrifying strength. The giant is essentially wearing and
carrying a weight of metals that is heavier than his ruddy young opponent.
Indeed, the contrast between the two men could hardly be greater than
it appears in 1 Sam 17:38–39, when David finds himself ill-suited to wear
the armor of Saul and chooses to face Goliath with no bodily protection
whatsoever and armed only with a sling—a young “nature body” against
a cultured, older “machine body.”73 The two figures in conflict here could
not be more different, whereas Saul’s and Goliath’s bodies appear suspi-
ciously similar.
The scene with Goliath comes at a critical juncture in the relationship
between Saul and David, bridging the bodily success of one character,
71. An act of imagination: If the average male ancient audience member for this text stood
about 5'6'' or 5'7'' tall, and if Saul is perhaps 12'' taller than his contemporaries, Saul and
Goliath would be almost the same height—say, Saul at 6'7'' and Goliath at 6'9''.
72. E.g., Jeffrey R. Zorn, “Reconsidering Goliath: An Iron Age I Philistine Chariot Warrior,”
BASOR 360 (2010): 1–23, and James K. Hoffmeier, “David’s Triumph over Goliath: 1 Samuel
17:54 and Ancient Near Eastern Analogues,” in Egypt, Canaan and Israel: History, Imperialism,
Ideology and Literature: Proceedings of a Conference at the University of Haifa, 3–7 May 2009, ed.
Shay Bar, Dan’el Kahn, and J. J. Shirley (Leiden: Brill), 87–114.
73. On David’s connection to nature here (e.g., stones and sticks), see Gregory Mobley, “The
Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” JBL 116.2 (1997): 217–233, here 233.
48
1
Saul, to that of another, David. With David’s stunning victory, Israel’s eyes
turn to him.
The Heroic Body of David

Several references to David have already been made in our discussion of
Saul, but now it is time to turn explicitly to Saul’s successor in review of his
bodily status throughout the narratives in which he appears (1 Samuel 15–1
Kings 2). Having established some of the key categories and distinctions
of heroic bodily activity in 1 Samuel through Saul, I proceed very directly
with David in two key categories: his beauty and youth, and his role in
manipulating the bodies of others. On the whole, David’s body appears less
conflicted than Saul’s—understandable because, as most assume, the nar-
ratives of the early monarchy bear strong pro-Davidic marks—though as a
prototype of the Israelite monarchy and, by long extension, all of its ideal
males, David’s role is nevertheless complicated and multifaceted.74 David’s
body engages in active maneuvers: he cuts, he bows, he kills, he runs, he
dances. Moreover, David’s body not only influences our reading of other
male bodies but also has generated cross-gendered fusions in heroic lit-
erature, as József Zsengellér argues in his presentation of the heroine in
the Hellenistic book of Judith (both at the level of the text itself and in the
artistic reception of Judith vis-à-vis David).75
Young and Beautiful Body

As with Saul, our introduction to David comes through the agency of the
prophet Samuel and a sacrificial scene at which the prophet makes known
74. Clines, “David,” 215–16, assumes that “the myth of masculinity inscribed in the David
story was a very potent influence upon Israelite men,” and “reflects the cultural norms of
men of the author’s time”—Clines does not elaborate from what time period, exactly, these
cultural norms derive. I assume, as I think Clines does, that the David stories as a finished
whole, or some elements within these stories, come many decades or even centuries later
than a putatively “historical David” would have lived. However, I continue to suspect (e.g.,
along with Halpern, David’s Secret Demons, 57–72) that key elements of the David myth have
roots in real history and date to the tenth century bce. Note also White, “Saul’s Rise,” who
thinks that the pro-Saul elements in 1 Samuel 1–14 date to the historical reign of Saul himself
and his apologists.
75. József Zsengellér, “Judith as a Female David: Beauty and Body in Religious Context,”
in Religion and Female Body in Ancient Judaism and Its Environments, ed. Géza G. Xeravits
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 186–213. See Chapter 3 of this book for some additional comments
on Judith.
491
the divine choice of king (compare 1 Sam 9:13–14 with 16:1–5). Both election
scenes feature a divine “lottery” in which God chooses the king, and an
anointing (the process occurs nearly all at once for David, less so for Saul;
see 10:1; 10:20–24). And like our introduction to Saul, David’s narrative im-
mediately arrives brimming with bodily cues and possibilities:
When [Jesse’s sons] arrived, [Samuel] looked at Eliab, and he said,

“Surely, YHWH has his anointed one before him!” But YHWH said
to Samuel, “Do not look upon his appearance, or the height of his
stature—for I have rejected him. Not as man sees—for man looks
with the eyes—but YHWH looks with the heart.”76 (1 Sam 16:6–7)
The prophetic gaze thus follows a long line of royal gazes upon the bodies
of leaders in ancient Near Eastern texts, seeing physical qualities as confir-
mation of kingship.77 Seven of Jesse’s sons pass by, all rejected.
[Jesse] said, “The youngest (qatan) still remains, but he is now

herding the sheep.” Samuel said to Jesse: “Go and get him, for we
will not gather around (to eat or sit down[?]‌) until he comes here.”
So he sent out and brought him in: he was ruddy (admoni), with
beautiful eyes (yepheh eynayim), and good in appearance (tov ro’i).
YHWH said, “Rise up and anoint him—this is the one.” (1 Sam
16:11–12)
Hertzberg sees this scene as “the keynote to the whole history of David,”
specifically in terms of David’s predetermined election.78 What role does
David’s body play in this scene? The passage resounds with overt com-
parisons to Saul’s physicality and the drama of Saul’s un-election in the
preceding chapters. Samuel apparently seeks out a Saul Part Two in terms
of Eliab’s height, looking with the natural eyes of political success that
would see in a domineering stature the sign of leadership, written upon
76. Most translate la-eynayim and la-levav here as “at the appearance/eyes” and “at the heart,”
respectively. Reading the preposition le-here as “with,” however, makes better sense of what
is actually happening here. For this translation, see also Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical
Narrative, revised and updated (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 186.
77. E.g., Winter, “Alluring Body,” 97. See Klein, Samuel, 160–61, for the extensive role of
“seeing” in 1 Sam 16:6–13, as well as broader comments on this by Sternberg, Poetics, 363–64.
78. Hertzberg, Samuel, 139.
501
the body. Regarding Eliab: in 17:28–30, the only other place Eliab appears
in the narrative, the oldest brother mocks David’s interest in the battle and
accuses him of ill intentions (compare with Saul’s repeated accusations of
David throughout the second half of 1 Samuel)—and then David’s turn to
meet Saul comes directly on the heels of the Eliab encounter.79 Followed
then by his encounter with Goliath, David bests three taller and older men
in short order.
Jesse’s own assumptions about birth order apparently play a role as
well—not even seeing the “youngest” as fit to pass before the prophet at
all. The verb qatan, “young,” can also mean “small,”80 thus reminding us
of Saul’s tall/small, prominence/hiddenness drama throughout 1 Samuel
9–15. However, with height as the primary outward criterion now disquali-
fied, a new bodily cue enters the drama: beauty. In reviewing the role of
beauty in the Hebrew Bible, Zsengellér points to assessments such as that
of Gerhard Von Rad in his seminal Old Testament Theology, who wanted to
subjugate all reference to human beauty as far subservient to the “contem-
plation of Jahwe’s revelation and action.” Von Rad went on to insist that
“as far as we can see, Israel lacked all critical reflexion on the phenomenon
of beauty and on artistic reproduction as such—she persisted in standing
right down to the last in sheer naïve experience.”81 Others rushed to the de-
fense of beauty, such as Athalya Brenner, who cited the political and social
relevance of beauty in terms of its connection with health and morality,
and these consequences cannot be merely confined to female sexuality but
apply directly to male bodies in the Hebrew Bible.82
When Saul’s servant recommends David to the ailing king, we learn
more about David, as the biblical narrator explicitly connects other he-
roic qualities with David’s beauty (16:18): “one who knows music,” that
is, a skillful musician (yode’a naggen); “a valiant warrior” (gibbor chayil);
“a man of war” (ish milchamah); “skillful with words” (nevon davar); “a
shapely man” (ish to’ar). Given the emphasis on David’s beauty at his first
79. The meeting here is odd since the two meet seemingly for the first time in this context,
though they have already met in ch. 16. See, e.g., McCarter, Samuel, 295–309, for a represen-
tative proposal for how to deal with the text-and source-critical problems in these chapters.
80. Klein, Samuel, 161, thinks the word here may well refer to size; the narrative emphasis
here points to birth order (age), but the connection with Saul’s size clearly functions as well.
81. Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1: The Theology of Israel’s Historical
Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; first published in 1957 by
Chr. Kaiser Verlag), 364–65.
82. Zsengellér, “Judith,” 189, citing Brenner’s Intercourse, 43.
151
appearance a few verses earlier and the ongoing narrative motif of the
leader’s body beginning at least in 1 Samuel 9, I do not read the final refer-
ence to David as ish to’ar as merely a side issue or final flourish to a longer
list of more authentic masculine heroic qualities in 1 Sam 16:18. Rather, the
beautiful body constitutes one of these heroic qualities.83 Insofar as David’s
qualities propel him to success, and thereby incur Saul’s murderous jeal-
ousy, the beauty proves to be just as dangerous (as a disadvantage) as it is
powerful (as an advantage). Stuart Macwilliam is thus correct to notice that
male beauty in these narratives does not convey straightforward “power,”
as opposed to female beauty, which supposedly ushers in vulnerability and
danger and powerlessness.84
Presumably, “ugliness” would be the opposite of “beauty,” though the
Hebrew Bible does not exhibit a quickly identifiable vocabulary of the
“ugly” (i.e., as a blunt counterpart to “beautiful”).85 The priestly language
of blemish (e.g., mum), as well as other markers of physical weakness, de-
formity, or grotesque features all qualify as “ugly” on biblical terms.86 We
are probably meant to think of Esau as ugly in Genesis 25 and perhaps
also Leah in Genesis 29, and all gigantic humans or six-fingered fighters
(2 Sam 21:15–22) form at least conceptual opposites to the bodies of David
and his men. Notably, though, the Hebrew Bible features no scene like
the Iliad 2.245–324, in which an explicitly ugly character named Thersites
rises up to abuse Agamemnon—the bard specifically lists his features,
perhaps compared and contrasted to those of Achilles on the levels of his
speech if not also his lowly appearance,87 a body provoking comedy in the
epic: “the ugliest man who ever came to Troy” . . . “Bandy-legged . . . with
one foot clubbed, both shoulders humped together, curving over his caved-
in chest, and bobbing above them his skull warped to a point, sprouting
clumps of scraggly, woolly hair.”88
83. Cf. Zsengellér, 197, who seems to see the “abilities” as distinct from the “appearance.”
84. Macwilliam, “Ideologies,” 285.
85. Compare with Brenner, Intercourse, 50, who discusses male bodies in terms of what they
lack (the foreskin and the penis [hidden from view in that only females are “nude”]).
86. E.g., Saul M. Olyan, Rites and Rank: Hierarchy in Biblical Representations of Cult (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103, and Schipper, “Plotting Bodies,” 392–95.
87. Bruce Louden, The Iliad: Structure, Myth, and Meaning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006), 142.
88. Translation from Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books,
1990), 106.
521
Beautiful Bodies in Genesis

Before analyzing David any further on this front, a review of beautiful bodies
in the Hebrew Bible up to this point in the storyline situates David’s phys-
icality within a long genealogy of biblical beauty—already suggesting that
beauty encodes not only the power and promotion of God’s elect but also
danger and the threat of illicit desire. All roads to thinking about beautiful
people in the Bible (primarily categorized by the adjective yapheh, for males
and females) lead through the book of Genesis. Indeed, beyond Genesis and
before 1 Samuel 16, few references to human physical beauty appear,89 and
after David in the whole of Samuel-Kings, outside of David’s own family, one
must read to Esther and the Song of Songs to find beautiful people.90
The physical appearances of the matriarchs—indeed, all of them (Sara,
Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel)—serve as a narrative hinge on which swings
the fate of the promise to Israel in Genesis. In the first instance (following
the narrative, ad seriatim), Abram proclaims that Sarai is “beautiful” (ishah
yephat-mareh), fearing Pharaoh will kill him and take her for a wife (Gen
12:11). Her beauty beguiles the Egyptians as Abram feared it would (12:14–
16).91 The visual cue leads the way: “when the official of Pharaoh saw
her . . .” (12:15). The narrator remains coy about the specifics of the subse-
quent relationship between Sarai and Pharaoh,92 and this reticence led to
“clarifying” interpretations of the episode in the Genesis Apocryphon (cols.
19–20), making clear that the two did not have sex—confirming the fact that
early Jewish readers indeed saw illicit possibilities in the Bible’s original
encounter.93 Genesis Apocryphon takes Sarai’s bodily description quite a bit
89. E.g., the beautiful hypothetical war captive in Deut 21:11; see the review of “beauty” terms
and passages in Macwilliam, “Ideologies,” 267–71.
90. Review in Jeremy Schipper, “Plotting Bodies in Biblical Narrative,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Biblical Narrative, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016), 389–97, here 392–95.
91. One Jewish tradition, in B. Bava Batra 16a (reflected also in Targ. Ps-Jon to Gen 12:11), as-
serts that Abraham never even looked at Sarah at all until the couple came to Egypt—thus
his exclamation first in Gen 12:11 about her appearance. See Rachel Neis, The Sense of Sight in
Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 140.
92. Compare with Ruth 3, where, without narrating an explicit sex act, the narrator has
shot the text through with the language of secrecy, innuendo, and suggestive keywords;
Jaime L. Waters, Threshing Floors in Ancient Israel: Their Ritual and Symbolic Significance
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 73–74.
93. Benjamin G. Wright and Suzanne M. Edwards, “‘She Undid Him with the Beauty of Her
Face’ (Jdt 16.6): Reading Women’s Bodies in Early Jewish Literature,” in Religion and Female
513
further than the Bible itself riffing on the spare affirmation of her beauty
in Genesis (1QapGen, col. 20):94
How . . . and pretty is the shape of her face, and how [lo]vely and
how smooth the hair of her head! How lovely are her eyes; how
pleasant her nose and all the blossom of her face. . . . How graceful
is her breast and how lovely all her whiteness! How beautiful are
her arms! And her hands, how perfect! How alluring is the whole
appearance of her hand[s]‌! How pretty are the palms of her hands
and how long and supple all the fingers of her hands! Her feet, how
lovely! How perfect her thighs!
Thus, in this text, Sarai’s Song-of-Songs-esque physical characteristics

make her alluring in an extreme way, perhaps further exonerating Abram
in the sense that others simply cannot resist his wife (not that Abram has
merely passed her around for money, as Genesis 12 allows). As many in-
terpreters have noticed, the female body in these texts is both dangerous
and deceptive. Sarai’s silence in the face of Pharaoh could suggest she is
a mere pawn in a male game of fear and desire,95 and later Rebekah could
be analyzed in the same way. The couple encounters a similar dilemma in
Genesis 20; though presumably king Abimelech of Gerar’s attraction to
Sarai is also predicated on her beauty, the narrator does not mention her
body in this scene.96 In Genesis 26, after the death of both Abraham and
Sarah, we learn that the problem of the matriarch’s beauty continues on
to the next generation: here Isaac describes Rebekah as “beautiful” (tovat
mareh; v. 7), again prompted by the fear that others will steal her. The
beauty and the fear go together.
Body in Ancient Judaism and Its Environments, ed. Géza G. Xeravits (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015),
73–108, here  92–94.
94. Text here from Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (eds.), The Dead
Sea Scrolls Study Edition, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 41.
95. E.g., J. Cheryl Exum, “Who’s Afraid of the ‘Endangered Ancestress’?” in her Fragmented
Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015;
originally published in 1993 by JSOT Press), 115–34.
96. Amy Kalmanofsky, Dangerous Sisters of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014),
91–100.
541
In the case of Sarai and Rebekah, their physicalities serve as the explana-
tion for why foreign men want them so much. In the case of Rachel and Leah,
bodily appearance describes Jacob’s strong preference for Rachel and plays
a crucial role in those narratives as a whole.97 “Now the eyes of Leah were
‘weak,’ but Rachel had a beautiful form and appearance. Jacob loved Rachel,
so he said to Laban, ‘I will serve you seven years for Rachel, your younger
daughter’ ” (Gen 29:17–19). The narrator’s commentary on the appearance
of the sisters, followed by Jacob’s immediate preference for Rachel, suggests
that we are to understand the preference as predicated on their appearance.
Leah is ugly and Rachel is pretty, and Jacob chooses the pretty one. The situa-
tion may not be that simple, however, for what are we to make of Leah’s “weak
eyes” (eyney leah rakkot)? Some translators view the adjective rak, which can
mean tender, frail, vulnerable, or weak—certainly not “strong,” but not nec-
essarily “ugly” or negative—as indicating a sense of beautiful delicacy: “Leah
had lovely eyes, and Rachel had a beautiful form and appearance.” Thus Jacob
chooses the younger sister along the lines of the no-outward-reason primo-
geniture reversal theme so prominent in Genesis (Gen 4:3–5; 21:1–21; 25:19–
26; 48:12–20—compare to David as youngest son in 1 Sam 16:11). Readers
should not explain Jacob’s failure to distinguish between the women on his
first wedding night in Gen 29:21–30 by tortured appeals to ornate bridal veils
or drunkenness; rather, the narrator casts verisimilitude aside to show how
Jacob duplicates Isaac’s failure to identify the bodies of his sons.
Not only the matriarchs Sarai, Rebekah, Rachel, and perhaps Leah, but
also Joseph receives narrative description as “beautiful of form and ap-
pearance” (Gen 39:6).98 Indeed, the language is identical to the description
of Rachel in Gen 29:17 (yephat-to’ar wiphat mar’eh), and employs termi-
nology also used for Sarai (yephat mar’eh). Unlike in English, in which
men are “handsome” and women are “pretty”—to call a man “pretty”
or even “beautiful” in most American English-speaking cultures would
be overtly or subtly derisive, probably indicating an over- concern for
appearances—Hebrew does not have separate terms for male and female
97. See Chapter 2 in this book on Jacob. Cf. Alter, Narrative, 67, 104, who differentiates be-
tween Rebekah’s and Rachel’s beauty on the grounds that the beauty of the former is “part
of her objective identity in a scene that she dominates,” while Rachel’s is merely “a casual
element,” mentioned only when we find that Jacob loves her.
98. Further analysis and reception history in James L. Kugel, In Potiphar’s House: The
Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),
66–93, and Macwilliam, “Ideologies,” 271–75.
515
attractiveness.99 Thus, Joseph becomes the first beautiful man in the Bible,
the sole forerunner of David in this respect. Such beauty carries with it
danger and opportunity, for the desire it evokes creates complications and
yet prospects for advancement for the beautiful ones.100 Just as both Sarai’s
and Rachel’s beauty provoked sexual misadventures marked by lies and,
later, the accumulation of wealth, so too does Joseph’s appearance lead to
an overt advance by Potiphar’s wife, an accusation of attempted rape that
sends Joseph to prison, and a chance encounter in that prison that cata-
pults him to a seat of power in Egypt.101
David’s Beautiful Ruddy Body

Given the relative lack of other beautiful bodies in Genesis–Kings, the
thematic connection between David and Genesis in this focus of beauty
is noteworthy. David comes off as a long-lost descendant of the nation’s
founding figures, one who, if the Genesis story patterns are to be followed,
will soon acquire (and possibly even lose, and re-acquire) a spouse, wealth,
and status. And in fact, he does (e.g., for wives, 1 Sam 18:27; 25:42–44; 30:5;
18; 2 Sam 3:15; 11:27). David’s body—his beauty—communicates so loudly
in our introduction to him in 1 Samuel 16 that it immediately threatens to
undermine the divine claim that the Lord considers not physical appear-
ances but some other factor (16:6–7). Both prophet and narrator clearly
swoon over bodies in this part of the story.102 For God, height represents
some kind of ugliness, a malformation of excess and the moral qualities
of arrogance; beauty seems qualitatively different. But how? What kind of
body, in David, does God prefer?
David’s “beautiful eyes” (yepheh eynayim) seem simple enough, as does
the generic reference to his “good appearance” generally (tov ro’i). But what
about the adjective admoni, “ruddy” or “reddish”? We may recall the use of
a similar bodily adjective from our study of Jacob and Esau in Chapter 2
of this book, where Esau was admoni in Gen 25:25—though combined (as
99. The adjective yapheh freely characterizes both men and women; see also, e.g., David in 1
Sam 16:12, 17:42; Absalom in 2 Sam 14:25; Abigail in 1 Sam 25:3; Tamar in 2 Sam 14:27.
100. Macwilliam, “Ideologies,” 279.
101. The drama between the poles of beauty and ugliness finds further elaboration in
Pharaoh’s dream of the cows in Gen 41:1–4 (retold and interpreted in 41:17–32).
102. See Clines, “David,” 222 on this point (citing Brueggemann, Samuel, 122–23) and 221–
23 on male beauty in the David story in broader perspective.
561
I assume it is) for Esau with the term that follows, kullo, “all of him,” the
picture here is one who is entirely “red,” possibly covered in thick red hair.
Admoni appears nowhere else in the Bible, however, except for describing
these two men.103 The giant Goliath in 1 Sam 17:42 cites David’s admoni
look as a point of derision, along with his youth (na’ar) and general beauty.
One possibility is that David simply has red hair,104 like Esau, but that, un-
like for Esau, this is a positive (or at least neutral) feature.
Along with an analysis on the connection between beauty and youth
in the David story and beyond, Stephen Wilson sees this “ruddiness” as a
feature of complexion, that is, the tender blush of youth, citing the fact that
the adjective admoni applies to Esau as an infant and the general associa-
tion of David’s appearance with his youth (such as 1 Sam 17:42; compare
with Joseph in Gen 39:6).105 I am inclined to agree with Wilson, that the
admoni label applies to skin and the brightness of youth, but I do not think
we need to limit our perception of David throughout 1–2 Samuel in terms
of his beauty only to his youthful rise in 1 Samuel 16–17. The desire he
embodies lasts much longer, as a permanent feature of our narrative per-
ception of him. He creates further (explicitly mentioned) beauty through
his children, Tamar in 2 Sam 13:1 and Absalom in 2 Sam 14:25–27—both
characters whose physicality complicates the narrative and indirectly or
directly threatens David—and the genealogy of David’s beauty and its en-
tanglements continues after David’s death in the body of Adonijah and his
failed coup (2 Kgs 1:5).106 David’s desire for another beautiful body draws
him into the Bathsheba affair and all its aftermath (2 Sam 11:2–5), and long
after his youth has passed, in 2 Samuel 6, as a fully established king, David
dances openly in front of the entire populace, an extravagant, uncovered
103. Note, however, the near exact term (from the same root) adom, in Songs 5:10: “My be-
loved is glowing (tsach) and ruddy (adom), distinguished among myriads.” This descriptor
“ruddy” makes its way into rabbinic analysis in Sifre Devarim (343.1–10) for describing God’s
own exemplary appearance. See analysis in Kaplan, My Perfect One, 139–41.
104. Alter, Narrative, 102.
105. Wilson, Making Men, 55–56; 96–98. Also on beauty and age, see Sternberg, Poetics,
362–63.
106. See discussion of Absalom in Chapter 3 of this book and note 2 Sam 15:5–6, where
Absalom demonstrates extravagant bodily connection with others, drawing people in phys-
ically, kissing, etc.; one thinks of the contemporary male-dominance gesture of pulling
someone in with a handshake. David’s sexuality comes up throughout 2 Samuel as a bodily
issue, highlighted when Absalom sleeps with his father’s concubines (2 Sam 16:21–22),
which Hamilton (Body, 208) discusses in terms of a father-son penis contest (compare with
the jab by Rehoboam in 1 Kgs 12:10).
517
act drawing attention to his body and causing threat of embarrassment (2

Sam 6:20).107 Perhaps it is precisely David’s more advanced age that makes
this act inappropriate for Michal, but David still insists on leading with his
body, which continues to retain its basic appeal.
Another function of David’s bodily magnetism—specifically regarding
youth and energy—appears in 1 Samuel 17, beginning with a reminder of
David’s situation as the “youngest” in his family (17:14) and then erupting
with bodily motion and themes continued from c hapter 16 in new ways.108
First, approaching the battlefield with the Philistines, David leaves his
things with the “baggage” (keli) and runs (rutz) out to meet the brothers.109
The contrast to Saul hiding in the keli, needing to be dragged into public
view, as opposed to David now running from the keli into a highly public
moment, should not be overlooked. The narrator continues to add layers
of bodily contrasts between the two men. Saul’s body comes back into play
now, with readers asked in the scene of the ill-suited armor (17:38–39) to
recall his height and the prominence/hiddenness drama from several
chapters earlier. Perhaps the armor doesn’t fit because Saul is too tall,110
but the text points more in the direction of ineptness or inexperience with
this accoutrement, only stating that “he tried to walk, for he was not prac-
ticed (with that sort of thing, i.e., not used to it)” (17:39). Saul is the military
expert, able to walk; his body performs in this specific way, as a seasoned
soldier, while David’s cannot.111 David engages in other strategies, such as
running (not easily done with armor) and using natural weapons (stones,
107. In reflection upon this scene, Halpern (David’s Secret Demons, 33) remarks that David is
“perhaps doing cartwheels in an era before the invention of underwear.”
108. Alter, Narrative, 118, notices the explosion of action verbs for David in 1 Sam 17:45–51, as
opposed to his stillness and silence in ch. 16.
109. Compare with Asahel in 2 Sam 2:18; 2 Sam 18:19–23 where running is also significant
(a sentinel can apparently recognize the running style of a particular individual at a dis-
tance?); miraculous running in 1 Kgs 18:46 (Elijah); frequent scenes of running and heroic
running motifs in the Iliad, e.g., the epithet “swift-footed Achilles”; and warrior themes in
the Ugaritic corpus detailed by Smith, Poetic Heroes, 17, 168, with other pertinent examples
included there.
110. Berlin, Poetics, 137.
111. Recall from Chapter 1 of this book the emphasis on bodily expert practice and perfor-
mance in Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” trans. B. Brewster and reprinted in Marcel
Mauss, Techniques, Technology, and Civilisation, ed. N. Schlanger (New York: Durkheim
Press/Berghahn Books, 2006; first published in 1936), 77–96 and the review of Talal Asad,
“Remarks on the Anthropology of the Body,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42–52, here 46-47.
581
staff, shepherd’s bag), all propelled by divine favor and thus a divine identi-
fication with the occupation of the shepherd and nature above thick armor,
swords, and corporate military technique.112
Goliath, too, gazes upon David, the visual sense highlighted by double
verbs for seeing in 17:42: “the Philistine looked (nabat) and saw (ra’ah)
David.” Like Samuel, but with added malice, Goliath initially dismisses
the boy, and the narrator ensures that we understand the basis of the dis-
missal by telling us Goliath’s thoughts, that is, David looks like a mere
child (na’ar), and admoni, and beautiful (yepheh mar’eh). When the direct
encounter begins, David again runs (17:48), and after killing the giant,
he “stands over” him (compare with the Amalekite “standing over” Saul
to kill him in 2 Sam 1:9) to cut his head off (1 Sam 17:51). This dismem-
berment is the first in a series of acts in which we find David expertly
manipulating bodies—his own and others’—toward political ends both
overtly violent and subtle.
Dismembering and Manipulating Bodies

Recent “biographical” studies of David have presented him as a master po-
litical manipulator.113 He murders, he lies, he tricks and cheats and steals,
in the way of violent usurpers the world over. The actions fall into rec-
ognizable patterns. David’s enemies are rejected by God, and worthy of
death. David’s own hands are ever clean of the brutal acts that remove the
enemies from his path to the throne, but the enemies meet their justified
doom nonetheless. David is chosen by God, though not without hang-ups,
and goes on to found a successful dynasty. Interpreters typically explore
112. As a counterpart to running as a youthful heroic activity, we might consider David’s acts
of bowing (chava/hishtachaveh) as a bodily posture of his more mature age (see 1 Sam 20:41;
24:9[8]‌; 2 Sam 12:15–23). David does not engage in a completely abnormal or unexpected
amount of bowing, so I hesitate to cite it as a heroic bodily motif—yet David does bow at
critical points, putting himself into the physical shape of obeisance and humbling himself
at the right times. The patriarchs and their servants in Genesis do a lot of bowing, dispro-
portionate to the amount of times we find this gesture elsewhere (Gen 18:2; 19:1; 23:7; 24:26;
24:48; 24:52; 33:3; 33:6; 37:7–10; 42:6; 43:26–28; 47:23; 48:12). The motion seems to belong
to a genteel, older world of formalities and extravagance; this is one more sense, in addition
to his beauty, that David is linked to the ancestral narratives and acquires an ancestral body.
113. E.g., Joel Baden, The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero
(New York: HarperCollins, 2013); Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Halpern, David’s Secret Demons, 81; Halpern
in particular notices that the “significance of retaining control over corpses was not lost on
David.”
591
dimensions of this rise to power through theological and literary avenues,

examinations of authorship (i.e., the notion of a pro-David court narra-
tive or royal apology text of some kind within 1–2 Samuel), or attempts to
figure out which elements of the story reflect real history.114 I take the basic
value of these approaches for granted, and in the following section present
some dimensions for further understanding David’s bodily significance—
particularly as a manipulator of bodies, of others and his own.
Dismemberment and Corpse Movement

David enacts a massive amount of violence in 1–2 Samuel, most of which
does not involve dismembering and moving bodies. By one generous
count, David and men under David’s command kill approximately 140,000
people between 1 Samuel 17 and 2 Kings 2.115 Among other explicit bodily
motifs, David measures bodies out, literally, on the ground for killing (2
Sam 8:2), and the series of belly-stabbings in 2 Samuel, enacted by David’s
men, recall the gore scenes from Judges, particularly Ehud in Judges 3 (2
Sam 2:23, Abner skewers Asahel; 3:27, Joab stabs Abner; 4:6, Rechab and
Baanah stab Ishbaal; 20:10, Joab stabs Amasa).116
In particular, with echoes of intense bodily violence in Judges, David
embarks on a series of dismemberments and corpse movements that dem-
onstrate the power of the torn body as a political maneuver and a symbol
of dominant conquest. In his first battle scene, David beheads Goliath and
transports both his head and armor (1 Sam 17:48–54). Later, in 1 Sam 21:9,
Goliath’s sword appears to have been taken as well, though not specifically
by David. It is not particularly clear why David should behead Goliath. The
story already features an oddity related to the killing of the giant, in that
Goliath seems to die from the initial stone wound to the head (1 Sam 17:49),
summarized in verse 50: “David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling
and stone—he struck down the Philistine, and killed him, without any
sword in David’s hand.” The very next verse, however, has David rush up
114. See, e.g., Halpern, David’s Secret Demons. McCarter, Samuel, 27–30 and passim throughout
the commentary (but not without precursors) made the question of the royal apology genre
a popular topic, on which see now Andrew Knapp, Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East
(Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), esp. 161–248 on David.
115. Clines, “David,” 216–17.
116. See Chapter 3 of this book for extended discussion, as well as Lawson G. Stone, “Eglon’s
Belly and Ehud’s Blade: A Reconsideration,” JBL 128.4 (2009): 649–63, esp. 652, 657–59,
on the belly wound in the Iliad.
601
to the Philistine, standing over him: “He took his [presumably Goliath’s]

sword and drew it out from its sheath, and killed him; then with it he cut
off his head” (v. 51). After the following mad plunder, David takes the head
of Goliath to Jerusalem—we are not told why, or what anyone does with it
there—and keeps the giant’s armor for himself, in his tent (v. 54).
The appropriation of the head to Jerusalem re-enacts a shame and mu-
tilation pattern, which we have had occasion to explore through various
scenes in Judges (particular for Adoni-Bezek in Judges 1). Such acts serve
to reverse preexisting dynamics of power, turning the potentially vulner-
able victim, David, into the mega-aggressor.117 Moreover, the act of hauling
the head to Jerusalem in particular begins to symbolically chart out a path
for David to make Jerusalem his capital, the fame that will bring him there
first predicated on this great victory over the giant. The connection of the
head to Jerusalem can be read not only “symbolically,” however, as the
manipulation of enemy (or ally) body parts to politically helpful sites as
real signs of conquest and appropriation would remain for David a key
strategy in his ongoing battle with Saul (2 Sam 4:12; 21:10–14). The strip-
ping of Goliath’s weaponry and armor mirrors acts by David against Saul,
by which David takes Saul’s “body” (in the form of clothing, weapons, etc.)
into his own possession. In 1 Sam 18:25–29, David enacts a somewhat sim-
ilar pattern against the major international enemy Philistines, though on
a less grand scale, cutting off the foreskins of one hundred Philistine men
and transporting them to Saul as a marriage price for Michal.
Not all dismemberments in 1–2 Samuel occur directly at David’s hands,
however. In 2 Sam 10:4–5, the Ammonite Hanun shaves off half the beards
of each of David’s men, a form of temporary mutilation from which the
men must first recover to regain their honor. In 2 Sam 20:22, Joab re-
ceives the dismembered and tossed head of Sheba, thrown over a city wall
to settle a chase that had ended there. In this case, the dismemberment
indirectly benefits David and occurs by his agency, in that Joab is David’s
lead military figure and Sheba was David’s enemy. A series of body im-
ages are featured in 2 Sam 4:4–12, including a beheading and movement
of the head, of Saul’s son, Ishbaal, and a dismemberment, of Rechab and
117. Tracy M. Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 125.2
(2006): 225–41, especially. 225–26 on shame, mutilation, and political reversal. See also
Debra Scoggins Balentine, “What Ends Might Ritual Violence Accomplish? The Case of
Rechab and Baanah in 2 Samuel 4,” in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives,
ed. Saul M. Olyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–26.
6
11
Baanah, the killers of Ishbaal, whose hands and feet David orders to be
cut off, their bodies then hung and put on public display. Here the vio-
lent acts cannot serve to create a political “reversal,” as David clearly al-
ready holds the throne. Rather, they confirm David’s status as a righteous
protector of Saul’s house. Associated with this drama in 2 Samuel 4, and
then with further reference in 2 Sam 9:1–13; 19:24–30, is Mephibosheth’s
disability (“lame in both feet”). Although most view Mephibosheth’s phys-
icality as a foil to Davidic royal wholeness—abled versus disabled—Jeremy
Schipper makes a strong case for viewing the narrative dynamic as more
complicated, inviting readers to see various body types in an ongoing
conversation.118
Fake Bodies
Two different scenes in which David’s life comes under grave threat ap-
pear in 1 Samuel, somewhat close to each other in the narrative and both
involving David’s flight from Saul. First, in 1 Sam 19:11–17, Michal saves
David by letting him out the window, escaping Saul’s men, and then
crafting a bizarre David mannequin out of a teraphim—presumably a life-
sized anthropomorphic divine image in this context?119—covered with
goat’s hair and clothes to dupe Saul’s messengers. They fall for the trick,
in a manner at least vaguely reminiscent of the encounter between Esau
and Isaac in Genesis 29.120
In a second scene, very different from the mannequin replacement but
again invoking the notion of a “fake body,” in 1 Sam 21:10–15 David again
escapes a difficult scenario and finds himself terrified of king Achish of
Gath. To avoid suspicion as a mighty warrior, David pretends to be insane,
scratching the gate-doors and losing control of his saliva.121 The bodily
game works to fool Achish, while at the same time, David’s actions func-
tionally mock Saul’s occasional mental instability (i.e., during prophetic
118. Jeremy Schipper, Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the
David Story (London: T&T Clark, 2006).
119. Cf. speculations in Hamilton, Body Royal, 198–200.
120. Alter, David, 120, sees in the story pointed allusion to Rachel’s theft of her father’s tera-
phim in Gen 31:33–35.
121. For a detailed examination of the terminology of mental disability in this passage, see
Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66–70.
621
manias or suffering from the “evil spirit”).122 Thus, it is not only the case
that David must inhabit various conceptual bodies, of friends or enemies,
in order to become king;123 he must, at points, manipulate his own body
into something entirely different, cleverly moving in and out of the bodies
of the insane and even inanimate objects to achieve the throne.
Conclusion: Two Bodies
The two bodies of Saul and David are so similar in key ways—noteworthy
among their peers, successful, and violent—yet for the narrator they could
not be more different in the end. Saul’s height turns out to be the bodily
opposite of David’s beauty, and the story goes to great lengths, through re-
peated layers of motifs of visibility and hiddenness shot through 1 Samuel
9–15, to show them as opposites. For all this effort, the text betrays a deep
ambivalence about Saul, encoded through his body among other ways.
Though scholars devote much more attention to David’s body, I began my
own analysis of these two figures with Saul, not merely because he appears
first in the narrative, but because I consider his body among the most
complex and contested—and perhaps in that sense, the most powerful—
of all heroic bodies in ancient Israel as we know it through the Bible, ri-
valled only by Jacob’s body in Genesis. True, in order for Saul’s body to
act—in many cases in 1 Samuel, and certainly after he has died throughout
2 Samuel—it requires collisions with and manipulations by others, spe-
cifically David, who becomes a crafty body manipulator and whose bodily
fate is tied to Saul’s in such a way that we may have trouble untangling the
two men from one another. These bodies come up for the narrators not
only in isolated scenes or leading descriptions, but I hope to have shown
in this chapter that they are also deftly woven into the ongoing fabric of
the story, so that motifs such as bodily prominence and hiddenness play
a major role for readers discerning the merits of Saul and David vis-à-vis
one another.
The prolonged attention to bodies in 1 Samuel signals a clear narrative
concern to use the body as one of the primary systems for meaning crea-
tion and thus demonstrates again the way that significant bodies encode
122. Jeremy Schipper, “Joshua–Second Kings,” in The Bible and Disability: A Commentary, ed.
Sarah J. Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, and Amos Yong (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
2017), 93–119, here 107–8; Alter, David, 134.
123. As argued by George, “Assuming the Body,” 168–71.
613
political concerns, telling a national story as well as a personal drama.

What is this national story? At one level, the story concerns Israel’s pro-
found and even disconcerting double presentation about kingship itself.
The era of the Judges showed us nothing if not Israel’s deep need for royal
order (“In those days, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what
was right in their own eyes”), and the people demand a king (1 Samuel 8),
a totally expected move considering the fact that Moses had set out clear,
even-keeled rules for what the king should be like (Deuteronomy 17)—only
for God to reject the very notion out of hand as a type of idolatry (1 Sam
8:7–8). Yet God proceeds to choose Saul anyway, through an explicitly di-
vine process, then to reject him for subtle infractions, leading to his sui-
cide. It is a wild story, and Saul’s own body, sticking its head in and out of
the scene, hiding and showing itself in turns, participates in this story and
indeed creates it on deep levels.
641
615
Saul’s Heroic Bones
Saul, Again
Saul’s body should cease its activity after his death. The dueling bodies of
David and Saul, examined in Chapter 5, filled 1 Samuel, and David con-
tinues to act without Saul as a rival to establish his own kingship in 2
Samuel. However, the story of these two characters’ bodies continues on
for one further episode, tucked away at the end of 1 Samuel and then re-
sumed, after all other major action has finished, near the end of 2 Samuel.1
1. 1 Chr 10:1–14 partly parallels 1 Sam 31:1–13; the Chronicler’s account is basically similar to the
one in 1 Samuel, except for a few details, but it ends with the acts of Jabesh Gilead re-taking
Saul’s body and burying the bones beneath a tree. Saul Zalewski argues that the Chronicler
has presented the story in such a way as to make clear that Saul was executed by God directly,
as opposed to dying by the fault of David (“The Purpose of the Story of the Death of Saul in 1
Chronicles X,” VT 39 [1989]: 449–67). For Saul’s place within the Deuteronomistic History,
see Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2006) as well as the relevant sections in P. Kyle McCarter’s commentary on 1–
2 Samuel: I Samuel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 439–44; II Samuel (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1984), 436–46. According to McCarter (I Samuel, 440), the Chronicles pas-
sage “seems to hark back to a shorter, more primitive version” of the story, which is certainly
possible.
A germ of the idea in the present chapter first appeared in my doctoral dissertation,
was presented at the SBL Annual Meeting, and then formally published in an article that
forms the basis of this chapter (with kind permission from Harvard Theological Review).
The dissertation was later published as The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm
in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (Boston: Ilex Foundation; Washington D.C.: Center for
Hellenic Studies, 2012), with reference to Saul’s bone drama on page 195; the presentation
was “The Fate and Power of Heroic Bones and the Politics of Bone Transferal in Ancient
Greece and Israel” (Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions panel on “Civil Strife and
Ancient Mediterranean Religions”; Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Atlanta,
GA: November 22, 2010); and the published article appeared as “The Fate and Power of
Heroic Bones and the Politics of Bone Transfer in Ancient Israel and Greece,” HTR 106.2
(2013): 201–16.
6
61
At the beginning of this two-part narrative (1 Sam 31:1), we find Saul atop
Mount Gilboa, badly wounded by Philistine archers and nearly dead.
Fearing the Philistine armies will rush upon him and continue the humil-
iation—perhaps by stabbing him repeatedly while he is still alive, as Saul
suggests in 31:4, or something worse2—Saul commits suicide. As the rest
of the chapter recounts, upon finding his corpse, the enemy army abuses
him in a different but perhaps not less dreadful manner, by beheading
the king and hanging the remainder of his body on the wall of Beth Shan
(along with the bodies of his sons, who also died in the battle).3 The resi-
dents of Jabesh Gilead, however, hear of these events and abscond with
the bodies, burying the bones in their own territory and thus ending this
particular episode of conflict between Israel and Philistia.
The story does not end here, however, as the international context gives
way to intra-Israelite strife in the second part of the drama. Saul’s past
mistreatment of the Gibeonites (not described in the Bible) comes back
to haunt his family: we are informed that a three-year famine during the
time of King David came as the result of Saul’s attempt to annihilate these
non-Israelites who had lived peacefully within Israel’s borders (see Joshua
9). The famine’s solution—initiated by David and carried to fruition by the
Gibeonites—is to impale seven of Saul’s sons, resulting in a grisly moun-
taintop scene (2 Sam 21:9) mirroring the site of Saul’s death along with
his own heirs in battle. Rizpah, mother of two of the impaled sons of Saul,
proceeds to hold a long vigil over the bodies, prompting David to reclaim
the bones of Saul and Jonathan from Jabesh Gilead and re-bury them in
the tomb of Saul’s family in the land of Benjamin. Only after this bone
transferral is accomplished do the famine and its accompanying bloody
conflict come to an end.
There are many odd and noteworthy features of this story, just as Saul’s
place within the narratives of 1–2 Samuel is shot through with the marks
2. The verb used here ht’ll, appears several other times in the Bible, e.g., in reference to the
way YHWH made a mockery of Egypt during the Exodus (Exod 10:2; 1 Sam 6:6); to describe
the abuse that accompanies a violent gang rape (Judg 19:25); and in the mouths of kings wor-
ried about what invading armies will do with their bodies (here, with a parallel in 1 Chr 10:4,
and Jer 38:19). Cf. Num 22:29 and Ps 141:4, where the action seems less severe or specific.
3. See Chapter 3 of this book for discussion of the bodily mutilation and dismemberment
theme, as well as Debra Scoggins Balentine, “What Ends Might Ritual Violence Accomplish?
The Case of Rechab and Baanah in 2 Samuel 4,” in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New
Perspectives, ed. Saul M. Olyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–26, and Tracy M.
Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 125.2 (2006): 225–41,
esp. 239.
617
Saul’s Heroic Bones 167
of divine election, un-election, loopholes, disaster, and redemption. All of

this suggests a deep and creative ambivalence regarding the status of Saul
as king and casts a series of questions over his final place in the narrative.4
At times, the narrator of 1 Samuel seems to praise Saul by faint damnation,
presenting his disqualification from kingship through a series of infrac-
tions that seem trivial or unfair, while at the same time damning him (and
eventually, several of his sons). Indeed, Saul seems to embody a distinctly
tragic pathos, and there have been limited but notable attempts to im-
agine him along the lines of Greek models—either as a figure in a Hebrew
tragedy5 or as a full-blown Mediterranean “hero.”6
Following in this tradition of comparative studies linking Saul with
Greek heroic themes, in this chapter I take a much more detailed look—as
opposed to the broader, more programmatic vistas I’ve pursued in the pre-
vious chapters of this book—at these bone-transferral narratives in light
of what is known about heroic bone relics and the politics of hero cults in
the Iron Age western Mediterranean. Saul’s status as an Israelite hero is
4. See comments on the bodily aspects of this dynamic in Chapter 5 of this book, as well
as, generally, David M. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story
(Sheffield: JSOT, 1989); Diana V. Edelman, “Saul ben Kish in History and Tradition,” in
The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, ed. Volkmar Fritz and Philip R. Davies (Sheffield,
UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 142–59; and V. Philips Long, “The Reign and Rejection
of King Saul: A Case for Literary and Theological Coherence” (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).
5. This line of comparison is taken up, e.g., by Sarah Nicholson, Three Faces of Saul: An
Intertextual Approach to Biblical Tragedy (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); J.
Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 70–119; Thomas R. Preston, “The Heroism of Saul: Patterns of
Meaning in the Narrative of the Early Kingship,” JSOT 24 (1982): 27–46; and Yairah Amit,
“The Delicate Balance in the Image of Saul and Its Place in the Deuteronomistic History,”
in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2006), 71–79, esp. 71–72.
6. Preston argues that Saul emerges as the true “hero” vis-à-vis David, due, in part, to
his “heroic death” on the battlefield (“Heroism of Saul,” 27–28, 33, 36–37, 42–43). W. Lee
Humphreys sees an older version of the Saul story that bears Aegean influence and presents
a truly “heroic” Saul (“From Tragic Hero to Villain: A Study of the Figure of Saul and the
Development of 1 Samuel,” JSOT 22 [1982]: 92–117, at 106). See also Humphreys’s earlier
comments in “The Tragedy of King Saul: A Study in the Structure of 1 Samuel 9–31,” JSOT
6 (1978): 18–27, and in “The Rise and Fall of King Saul: A Study of an Ancient Narrative
Stratum in 1 Samuel,” JSOT 8 (1980): 74–90. In the latter article especially, Humphreys
compares Saul with specific Greek heroic motifs, but not bone transfer (“The Rise and Fall,”
83–87). Gregory Mobley finds in Saul “a full range of heroic attributes: demonstrated valor
(1 Sam 11:5–11; 14:20–23, 47–48), martial rage (1 Sam 11:5), the ‘breath of YHWH/Elohim’ (1
Sam 10:6, 9; 11:6; 19:23), a signature weapon (his spear; 1 Sam 13:22; 18:10; 19:9; 20:33; 22:6;
26:7, 11, 12, 16, 22; 2 Sam 1:6), and even (perhaps) a special birth (1 Samuel 1)” (“Glimpses
of Heroic Saul,” in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White
[Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006], 80–87, at 80).
681
a hitherto underexplored lens through which to investigate the meaning

and power of Saul’s dead body, and I argue that by comparing the biblical
account of the transferral of Saul’s bones with classical Greek texts of he-
roic bone transfer, we are able to see the political import of David’s actions
in the Bible more clearly as a “body manipulator”7 and thus better under-
stand the dynamics of bodily power in this text. Few studies have hitherto
considered the way that body parts or other physical items are conceived
of as “relics” or objects of power in the Hebrew Bible, and by considering
Saul’s bones as just such objects I hope to make a contribution to this
realm of scholarship. Moreover, the exploration of the hero’s body in terms
of “hero cult” allows us a glimpse, even if just in this single instance,8 at
a heroic bodily theme of enormous religious significance throughout the
broader ancient Mediterranean world.
Interpretations and Sources

In the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century theological context,
scholars seized upon the gruesome weirdness of the solution to the famine
in the second part of our story either to apologetically quell concerns that
the story evinces some demonic vengeance or, alternatively, to highlight
and promote these exact features as evidence of the benefit of historical
criticism in pointing up “primitive” features of a bygone layer of Israelite
religion represented in the killings.9 More recent studies have continued
to focus on various religious or legal aspects of the scene in 2 Sam 21:10–14
involving Rizpah and David’s bone transfer.10 Saul Olyan has analyzed the
actions of the Gileadites in terms of honor and shame categories played
7. A category I proposed for examining David’s body and actions in Chapter 5 of this book.
8. See Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 153–99, for suggestions about other potential hero cult dy-
namics in Israel and beyond in the ancient Near East.
9. One can see something of both of these tendencies in William G. Jordan, “Homiletics and
Criticism: II Samuel 21:1–14,” BW 33 (1909): 32–37.
10. Essays discussing the specific religious or legal factors at play in the text are numerous,
in addition to the commentaries, including three studies published in 1955 by different au-
thors: Henri Cazelles, “David’s Monarchy and the Gibeonite Claim,” PEQ 87 (1955): 165–75;
Arvid S. Kapelrud, “King and Fertility: A Discussion of II Sam 21:1–14,” NTT 56 (1955): 113–22;
and Abraham Malamat, “Doctrines of Causality in Biblical and Hittite Historiography: A
Parallel,” VT 5 (1955): 1–12. See also Ze’ev Weisman, “Legal Aspects of David’s Involvement
in the Blood-Vengeance of the Gibeonites,” Zion 54 (1989): 149–60 [in Hebrew]. For a more
extended bibliography on this front, see Simeon Chavel, “Compositry and Creativity in 2
Samuel 21:1–14,” JBL 122.1 (2003): 23–52, here 24 n. 4.
6
91
out through the sociolegal sphere of covenant relationships, as well as

the concept of burial at the patrimonial tomb;11 David’s acts of re-burial
in 2 Sam 21:11–14 echo an earlier scene in 2 Sam 4:12, where David had
previously interred a Saulide heir, Ish-bosheth, in a family grave.12 Mark
Hamilton has also analyzed Saul’s royal body, both physical and meta-
phorical, pointing out the ways in which “royal bodies reflect the culture’s
ideas, values, hopes, and fears, in short, its cosmology”13—ideas that we
have been exploring throughout this book.
In a thorough and mostly convincing investigation, Simeon Chavel has
conducted an “internal literary analysis” of the passage, focusing on the
source-critical problem instead of the supposed literary unity of the chapter
suggested by its appearance at the end of 2 Samuel.14 Chavel identifies two
sources—one in 2 Sam 21:1–11, 13a, and 14b, and the other in verses 12, 13b,
and 14a—and points to the seemingly “alternate set of assumptions and
approaches” to the dead bodies in each source. In the former narrative,
David and Saul stand in antagonistic terms, with David’s vow contravening
Saul’s quest to annihilate the Gibeonites; instead, Saul’s descendants are
shamed. In the latter source, David, “in the throes of his attempt to estab-
lish his credentials as king,”15 acts with loyalty toward Saul. The source in
which the Gibeonites are featured resonates with themes and vocabulary
appearing throughout 2 Samuel 2–6, while the bone transfer story has
nothing to do with the Gibeonites and rather seems to continue the nar-
rative in 1 Sam 31:8–18, where Saul’s bones are stolen in the first place.16
11. Saul M. Olyan, “Honor, Shame, and Covenant Relations in Ancient Israel and Its
Environment,” JBL 115.2 (1996): 201–18, at 214–15.
12. Saul M. Olyan, “Some Neglected Aspects of Israelite Interment Ideology,” JBL 124.4
(2005): 601–16, at 605, 612.
13. Mark W. Hamilton, “The Creation of Saul’s Royal Body: Reflections on 1 Samuel 8–10,”
in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. Carl S. Ehrlich and Marsha C. White (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2006), 139–55, at 141. See also the brief discussion of Saul’s second burial in 2
Sam 21:13–14 in Hamilton’s The Body Royal: The Social Poetics of Kingship in Ancient Israel
(Leiden: Brill, 2005), 168–69. On Saul and the royal ancestral cult, note also Francesca
Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims
(London: T & T Clark, 2010), 114–15.
14. Chavel, “Compositry.” Julius Wellhausen first suggested this putative unity via the
palistrophe in 2 Samuel 21–24; see Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher
des alten Testaments, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1899), 260–61 (cited in Chavel, “Compositry,”
23 n. 2).
15. Chavel, “Compositry,” 36.
701
For Chavel, David’s calm and controlling command over the transfer of
the Saulide heirs to the Gibeonites betrays a situation in David’s reign
after David has assumed total control of the country, whereas the bone
transfer story—which uses David’s personal name and never “the king”
(hammelek), unlike the other source, which uses both—reflects a situa-
tion wherein the author is still trying to show David’s careful involvement
in not looking like a villain who takes advantage of Saul’s misfortune
for his own advancement.17 For Chavel, the text as we have it in 2 Sam
21:1–14 not only exhibits internal discontinuities, but the reference to the
bone transfer is out of step with the earlier narrative action in 1 Samuel 13,
wherein Saul seems to be buried with some finality.18 I will return to this
seeming dichotomy of tones later in this study, but suffice it to say that,
on thematic grounds, and particularly on the basis of the bone transfer ac-
counts by which I will analyze this text, there is no strong reason to accept
David’s actions in either supposedly discrete source as standing in clear
contradiction to the other, even if we find in this narrative a push and pull
of conflicting motivations and political calculation.
Heroic Bone Transfer in the Western

Mediterranean and Beyond
Stories of the relocation of important bodies are fraught with indica-
tions that these bone transferrals are transactions of political power, as
demonstrated by several well-known examples in classical Greek texts.19
Narratives of heroic bone transfer in the western Mediterranean appear
in a variety of sources, as texts spanning from Herodotus through the
Roman period contain no less than thirteen different examples of this
distinct and (nearly) formally uniform type of account.20 In these stories,
17. Chavel, “Compositry,” 47–48.
19. For this Greek comparative angle, see also the brief note by Guy Darshan, “The
Reinterment of Saul and Jonathan’s Bones (II Sam 21,12–14) in Light of Ancient Greek Hero-
Cult Stories,” ZAW 125.4 (2013): 640–45.
20. I derive this specific number from Barbara McCauley, “Heroes and Power: The Politics of
Bone Transferal,” in Ancient Greek Hero Cult: Proceedings of the Fifth International Seminar on
Ancient Greek Cult, Organized by the Department of Classical Archaeology and Ancient History,
Göteborg University, 21–23 April 1995, ed. Robin Hägg (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen,
1999), 85–98, here 96 (see n. 40 on the same page for a list of these thirteen examples). For
my analysis of Greek and Latin accounts of bone transferral, I rely on McCauley’s thorough
171
we find a generic pattern of action: (1) a population learns via oracle that

heroic bones are needed to secure some benefit; (2) the bones are then
procured, either by a miraculous discovery, by a clue from the oracle, or
by outright theft; (3) and the subsequent transfer of the bones to the city
in need brings victory or some other blessing.21 Because the religious im-
portance of bone transfer deeply relies on, and interacts with, notions of
hero cult generally, and since the religious power of the hero cult relies on
both a political claim to legitimation and personal, spiritual benefits to the
citizenry,22 I find the debate regarding whether the bones themselves as
physical objects were thought to contain some sort of numinous power—
as opposed to viewing them only as “symbolic” political tokens—to be
misguided, insofar as the two views are presented as mutually exclusive.23
Both dynamics were in play, and inextricable from one another, whenever
the bodies of heroes were involved.
The parade example of heroic body movement in classical literature is
the late fifth-century bce Sophoclean Oedipus cycle, where the fate of he-
roic bones is a standing concern through a three-part dramatic movement
(Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone). The second part of this
drama, Oedipus at Colonus, is of primary significance for our discussion
here, because the final resting place of Oedipus’s heroic body—the object
treatment of the issue, as well as Carolyn Higbie, “The Bones of a Hero, the Ashes of a
Politician: Athens, Salamis, and the Usable Past,” CA 16.2 (1997): 278–307, esp. 296–301;
Anthony J. Podlecki, “Cimon, Skyros, and ‘Theseus’ Bones,’” JHellSt 19 (1971): 141–43.
Note also the older but still useful study of Friedrich Pfister, Der Reliquienkult im Altertum
(Giessen: Töpelman, 1909–1912; reprinted by Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974).
21. McCauley, “Heroes and Power,” 96.
22. On hero cult, see the essays inChristine Schmitz and Anja Bettenworth (eds.), Mensch—
Heros—Gott. Weltentwürfe und Lebensmodelle im Mythos der Vormoderne (Stuttgart: Steiner,
2009). For archaeological data, Carla M. Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb
Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); Carla M.
Antonaccio, “Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece,” AJA
98.3 (1994): 389–410; for textual reflexes, Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of
the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),
67–210. The “mystical,” personal aspects of hero cult are clearly evident, for example, in
Philostrotus’s On Heroes, on which see Gregory Nagy, “The Sign of the Hero: A Prologue to
the Heroikos of Philostratus,” in Flavius Philostratus, Heroikos, trans. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken
and Jennifer K. Berenson Maclean (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), xv–xxxv. This
is not to mention the varieties of healer ideologies attached to cults of heroes, for which see
Wolfgang Speyer, “Heros,” RAC 14 (1988): 861–77, esp. 870, and Lewis R. Farnell, Greek Hero
Cults and Ideas of Immortality: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in
the Year 1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) 150–51, 234–79.
23. McCauley argues against the view that bones were considered as talismans or “magic”
objects in their own right (“Heroes,” 94).
721
of both intense horror and powerful reverence—is the central narrative

concern.24 Having become a pariah to Thebes, his homeland, Oedipus
travels a path from curse to blessing, from ritual pollution to stability
and welcome in a new home (near Athens). The power of the body (high-
lighted, e.g., in Colonus 385) has implications for Oedipus’s homeland, as
various claimants to the throne of Thebes, such as Creon, wish to com-
mandeer Oedipus’s dangerous body as a boon for their own political ven-
tures. Indeed, Creon seeks to bring Oedipus near—but not into—Thebes,
so as to avoid an oracular pronouncement stating that the Theban army
would suffer a defeat if Oedipus were to be buried outside his hometown.
Oedipus rejects Creon’s efforts, and, conversely, assures Creon that his
spirit will act as an agent of harm toward those who had once rejected him
(Colonus 765–84). Thus we see the power of the heroic body, in conjunc-
tion with an oracular threat, demonstrated through the body of the figure
who is perhaps the most compelling locus of ritual and political ambiva-
lence of all heroic actors in Greek drama.
More succinct examples of bone transfer occur in Herodotus (Hist.
1.66–68), where we learn of the theft and transfer of Orestes’s bones from
Tegea to Sparta, and in Plutarch, regarding the movement of Theseus’s
bones from Skyros to Athens (Thes. 36.1–2; Cim. 8.3–6). The political crises
addressed by the bone transferral vary; most common are battles—for ex-
ample, the Trojan War apparently could not end until the shoulder blade
of Pelops was brought to the Greeks (Pausanias, Descr. 5.13.4)—or rival
territorial claims. Other transfers occur as the result of oracular instruc-
tion specifically for blessing (e.g., Hector’s bones brought from Ilium
to Thebes [Descr. 9.18.5]) or from seemingly unmotivated Delphic com-
mands (as in Descr. 8.9.3–4). One particularly extended account, recorded
by Pausanias (who records bone transfers with distinct interest and fre-
quency), tells of the transfer of Hesiod’s bones in a time of disaster, which
I quote here because it is a lesser-known story and because of the parallel
motif of famine/plague followed by an oracle and bone relocation found
in 2 Sam 21:1–14:
And there are graves of Minyas and Hesiod. They say that they re-
covered the bones of Hesiod in the following way. A plague had
24. E.g., Darice Birge, “The Grove of the Eumenides: Refuge and Hero Shrine in Oedipus
at Colonus,” CJ 80 (1984): 11–17, and Andreas Markantonatos, Oedipus at Colonus: Sophocles,
Athens, and the World (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 140–66.
713
fallen on man and beast, so they sent envoys to the god. The Pythian
priestess, they say, answered the envoys that their only remedy was
to bring back the bones of Hesiod from the land of Naupactus to the
land of Orchomenus. The envoys next inquired in what part of the
Naupactian territory they should find the bones, and the Pythian
priestess answered them again that a crow would show them the
spot. So when the messengers had landed, they saw, it is said, a rock
not far from the road with the bird perched on it; and they found the
bones of Hesiod in a cleft of the rock.25
Common to so many of these references (but lacking from the account

just cited) are the distinct political motivations of those who find, reclaim,
or steal the heroic bodies. In the case of the Spartan theft of Orestes’s
bones, regional territorial claims over and against Tegea were at stake, as
well as genealogical legitimation for the historically late-coming Spartans.
For the Athenian statesman Cimon, commandeering the bones of Theseus,
patron hero of Athens, was an extremely popular move among the cit-
izenry, if not a bald act of deception for his own political advantage. By
bringing Theseus’s bones to Athens, Cimon was simultaneously drawing
on the association of the miraculous appearance of Theseus at the battle
of Marathon to lead the Greeks to victory and on his own father’s notable
role in the same battle.26 As McCauley rightly argues, these bone transfers
function on many levels, and, as crass as the political manipulation may
appear in any given account, we should not think we have exhausted the
meaning of the act by only applying the reductionist category of “propa-
ganda” and simply moving on. Ancient actors—both leaders and broader
audiences—seem to have deeply believed in the power of these acts.27
The politically charged reclamation and movement of bones is not only
an ancient phenomenon, as many examples could show. One revealing an-
ecdote may suffice.28 On December 17, 2007, the anniversary of Venezuelan
25. Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. James G. Frazer; 6 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1913), vol. 1, 491 (9.38.3).
26. Discussion in McCauley, “Heroes,” 90–91.
27. McCauley, “Heroes,” 90–91.
28. Information here taken from “TB or Not TB: Venezuela’s President Buries Bad News
by Dis-interring a National Icon,” Economist (July 22, 2010): 40. The phenomena of relic
transfer and bone reclamation persisted through many societies and seemingly all eras; see
Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990). As Geary points out (pp. 5–7), a relic must somehow be identified
741
hero Simón Bolívar’s death (in 1830), president Hugo Chávez suggested
that Bolívar was murdered and did not die of tuberculosis, as had always
been thought. This charge of assassination carried with it a loaded political
parallel for Chávez, as the then-current president, stymied with economic
woes and waning popular appeal, first announced his theory just days after
a major referendum defeat on constitutional reform.29 In July, ahead of
the September elections in 2010, Chávez ordered the body of Bolívar to be
exhumed, with parts of the body (skull, teeth, and vertebrae) extracted and
tested for the poisoning theory. In the process of testing these body parts
for authenticity, Chávez claimed that the bones of Bolívar spoke to him,
confirming his identity: “Yes, it’s me,” Bolívar said. “That glorious skel-
eton must be Bolívar,” Chávez wrote on his Twitter page, “for we could feel
his spark.” The plan for the transfer of Bolívar’s body and the re-interring
of the bones, which occurred during the following year’s bicentennial cele-
brations (Venezuela declared its independence on July 5, 1811), served as a
capstone to the drama: a new burial would ensure that Bolívar does not lie
with various other national heroes of the past, whom Chávez disdained, as
in his previous grave, but rather in a new, presumably symbolically useful,
location.30 The association of Bolívar’s physical body with Chávez at a
charged moment in the latter’s career clearly demonstrates the enduring
value of the heroic body as a focal point of national hopes and anxiety.
Bone Transfer in the Saul Narrative

Let us now return to the narrative of Saul’s burial and re-burial. First, we
should recognize that the manipulation of Saul’s bones for political or po-
lemical purposes is not a unique incident in the Hebrew Bible. The trans-
ferral of the bodies of Jacob and Joseph are the most famous instances
as such, whether by a marked tomb, a temple, or some other context—which could include
written or oral tradition. The biblical account of the theft of Saul’s bones thus stands as a
lasting “identification” of the tradition; it is, in a sense, the final grave marker. Moreover,
Geary points to the manner in which relic theft is an act of cultural violence and meaning-
making, since this kind of theft breaks the bounded, initial context of identification and
replaces that context with a new one.
29. I.e., the parallel, for Chávez, is that his own political opponents were attempting to “as-
sassinate” him (either figuratively or literally).
30. A friend and specialist in Venezuelan politics at the University of Toronto, Donald
V. Kingsbury, informed me by personal communication that this exhuming did in fact occur
in 2011.
715
of such acts (Gen 50:2–13, 25–26; Exod 13:19; Josh 24:32). Joseph’s bone
transfer, in particular, functions along the lines of other stories wherein
the bones of a founding hero must be collected and returned to their place
of origin.31 Elsewhere, bone transferral is an act of desecration, as in 2 Kgs
23:16–20, where we find the collection and burning of bones on the altar
to fulfill a prophecy against Jeroboam in 1 Kgs 13:2.32 Further, the bones of a
powerful figure could possess revivifying powers, such as those of Elisha,
which bring a corpse to life in 2 Kgs 13:31–32.
Through Joseph’s bone transition, in particular, we see the implica-
tions of the individual heroic body as simultaneously a social or national
body in a clear way. In Gen 50:25–26, Joseph makes his brothers, called
“the sons of Israel” in verse 26, swear to bring his bones “up from here,”
that is, from Egypt to the land of Israel. The phrase bene yisrael (“sons of
Israel” or “Israelites”) gestures at a national organization, a political and
familial organization—a larger horizon for the meaning of one body for
many other bodies. Within Genesis, the phrase bene yisrael appears only
in the Joseph narrative, which scholars almost universally view as a later
composition not at one piece with the other ancestral narratives in Genesis
12–50, as well as in two moments in which the narrator peeks out from
behind the storytelling curtain and reveals his distance from the narrative
at hand: in Gen 32:32, commenting on why the bene yisrael do not eat meat
near the hip socket, and in Gen 36:31, where a genealogist informs us of
kings in Edom before any kings reigned over the bene yisrael. Exod 1:6 la-
conically re-narrates Joseph’s death, and then in Exod 13:19, Moses takes
up Joseph’s bones. The notice of Moses’s actions comes in the midst of
an asynchronous narrative aside, out of temporal sequence between the
description of the Passover in Exodus 12–13 and the first itinerary notice
of the journey out from Egypt in Exod 13:20. In Exod 13:17–18 the narrator
flashes forward to later stages in the wilderness wandering, remarking
that the people would not travel through Philistine territory—for God’s
concern that the people might attempt a return to Egypt at the prospect
of war with the Philistines—but rather that they would make progress
via the Reed Sea. The mention of Joseph’s bones alongside references to
31. See Moshe Weinfeld, The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the
Israelites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15, 34, and compare with the bone
transfer to a patrimonial grave in 1 Macc 13:25.
32. For bone scattering, burning, or other mistreatment as desecration, see Ps 53:6; 141:7; Jer
8:1; Ezek 6:5; Amos 2:1; see also Bar 2:24.
761
(1) battle with the Philistines, a group that would become an important
part of the new nation’s struggle in 1 Samuel, and (2) the Reed Sea, where
Israel would experience an iconic deliverance, thus gestures forward to the
future of Israel in the land.
As readers, we are thus now in position to imagine Israel carrying its
founding bodily identity with it as the Israelites travel, much as God’s own
presence travels with them in the wilderness via the Tabernacle structure.
The nation is not fully itself without Joseph’s literal body with them. In
Josh 24:32, we then have the final movement in the journey of Joseph’s
bones, which occurs at the occasion of the covenant at Shechem in Joshua
24. This climactic scene marks the full entrance of Israel into the land and
the full allotment of the tribal inheritances. Finally, at this point, Joseph’s
bones come to rest at Shechem in the field Jacob’s family had acquired
from Hamor in Gen 33:18–19. The fact that Joseph’s final burial seems to
be coterminous with Joshua’s death in Josh 24:29 (as well as the death of
Eliezar, Aaron’s son, in Josh 24:33) marks a significant moment of comple-
tion but also a transition to the new socionational reality.
Likewise, the narrative involving Saul’s bones is particularly detailed by
biblical standards and also comes not as one single reference but rather
in multiple scenes—which I present here as a two-part drama.33 The first
situation of national crisis is the stolen and defiled body of the king; the
second is the domestic famine. The first is easily understood in terms
of national shock, as the Philistine problem is clearly about the honor of
the entire country, while David’s motives in the second part are some-
what more difficult to ascertain and thus will be the main focus of my
comments here.
Part One: The Gileadites Transfer the Body

The residents of Jabesh Gilead, who first retrieve the bodies of Saul and
his sons from the wall of Beth Shan and bury them in their own territory,
33. Many commentators assume the stories in 1 Samuel 31 and 2 Samuel 21 were origi-
nally part of a unified, congruous story, uninterrupted by so much intervening material;
e.g., McCarter (II Samuel, 443) suggests that the story in 2 Sam 21:1–14 was at first omitted
from what now appears in 1 Sam 31:1–13 but was later reinserted by another editor in its
current place.
717
appear in two distinct stories in the Deuteronomistic History, both of

which bear importance for the present narrative.34
Jabesh Gilead makes a first inauspicious appearance in Judges 21. After
the Gileadite residents fail to attend a sacred assembly at Mizpah, the
tribes in attendance raise up a 12,000-man army to attack Jabesh Gilead,
slaughtering men, women, and children but sparing four hundred vir-
gins from the region, whom they then offer as marriage partners for the
previously shunned Benjamites. Thus, we find a putatively early (though
ignominious) genealogical bond between Benjamin, which is Saul’s tribe,
and Jabesh Gilead.35
Later, in 1 Sam 11:1–9, Jabesh Gilead finds a reason to be zealous for Saul
in particular: Saul personally rescues them from the harsh oppression of
Nahash the Ammonite. This first part of the bone transfer drama, then,
resounds with echoes of past tribal loyalties and political affiliations (not to
mention bodily themes, as Nahash had gouged out the eyes of the Gadites
and Reubenites—in the putatively original version of the story preserved
in the Dead Sea Scrolls, inserted in some contemporary translations be-
tween 1 Sam 10:27 and 11:1). When David learns of the actions of Jabesh
Gilead in burying Saul’s body (2 Sam 2:4–5), he praises them for this act
and immediately tries to woo them, simultaneously announcing Saul’s
death and suggesting, by blessing them, that the Gileadites should accept
David’s kingship.36 The Gileadite response as a whole is uncertain, but
the actions of the commander of Saul’s army, Abner, are clear: he whisks
away Saul’s remaining heir in the region, Ishbaal, who then becomes king
over not only Gilead but the entirety of the northern part of the country for
two years (this after David had already been anointed king in Jerusalem).
34. See Diana V. Edelman, “Saul’s Rescue of Jabesh-Gilead (1 Sam. 11.1–11): Sorting Story from
History,” ZAW 96 (1984): 195–209.
35. Susan Niditch suggests an implicitly “anti-Saulide” polemic in this story, as Jabesh Gilead
is possibly portrayed here as failing to affirm proper military unity with the rest of the nation
(Judges [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008], 209); in greater detail, Suzie Park, “Left-
Handed Benjamites and the Shadow of Saul,” JBL 134.4 (2015): 701–20. Cf. Robert G. Boling,
who finds the presentation of Jabesh Gilead sympathetic, as it is “the only segment of Israel
not guilty of overreacting” (Judges [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975], 292). Whatever the
case, it is certainly true, as Niditch points out, that in this “foundational tale” we see “an im-
portant sacred trail,” which “emphasizes national identity and maps an important means of
religious self-definition. The author thereby emphasizes that the roots of Israelite identity
are ancient and deep” (Judges, 210).
36. Olyan, “Honor, Shame, and Covenant,” 214.
781
Consequently, we find a clear and sustained pattern of alliance between

Jabesh Gilead and Saul.
Part Two: David and the Bone Transfer

The onset of a three-year famine during David’s reign is a social, polit-
ical, and religious crisis in the extreme.37 Not only is famine a disaster of
fertility regarding the land and its produce, but it is also a catastrophic
symbol of the failure of monarchic rule and the monarchic body itself.
In Psalm 72 (vv. 1–4, 12–16 in particular), for example, we are reminded
of the close connection between the ideologies of fertility, justice, and
kingship. When the king is upright, the people flourish, and the land pro-
duces in turn.38 Thus, a prolonged famine calls into question the right-
eous rule of the king. A famine obviously creates the devastating practical
problem of starvation, but the problem ripples outward and implicates
the monarch for abdicating his role in the order of the cosmos. One mid-
twentieth-century interpreter, Arvid Kapelrud, seized on just these associ-
ations and suggested that the famine of 2 Sam 21:1 could be broken only by
“a sacrifice of the highest rank,” namely, a member of Saul’s own family
(presuming David was not willing to sacrifice himself or one of his own
sons).39 Kapelrud further proposed that David himself may have suggested
to the Gibeonites that the famine was the result of some vague transgres-
sion Saul had perpetrated against them in the past40—we may note again
here the fact that nowhere is Saul’s excessive zeal against the Gibeonites
actually recorded in the Bible, though an anecdote like this may well have
served the author of 1 Samuel if indeed he had such a story at his disposal.
“It was only a man with the intelligence of David,” Kapelrud argues, “who
could get such an idea: to use the very sacredness of the royal family to get
37. This famine may have been caused by drought (hence the possible significance of the
falling rain in 2 Sam 21:10) or could signify some other problem of crop failure, infestation,
or disease.
38. For comments on this from biblical, Greek, and Babylonian perspectives, see Dale
Launderville, Piety and Politics: The Dynamics of Royal Authority in Homeric Greece, Biblical
Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 113–19.
39. Kapelrud makes this suggestion in two essays: “King and Fertility: A Discussion of II
Sam 21:1–14,” NTT 56 (1955): 113–22; and “King David and the Sons of Saul,” in La regalità
sacra. Contributi al tema dell’VIII congresso internazionale di storia delle religioni (Roma, aprile
1955) (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 294–301.
40. Kapelrud, “King David,” 300.
791
rid of its members.”41 If the author were trying to cover up the idea of a
royal, fertility inducing sacrifice—as he must be if Kapelrud’s interpreta-
tion is correct, since the biblical narrative gives a distinctly different reason
for the slaughter—then why tell the story at all?42 Whatever the specific
problems with such an argument, we should nonetheless view this fertility
failure as an important crisis of monarchic authority.
David’s action in response to the famine in 2 Sam 21:1—to “inquire
(baqash) of YHWH”—is a common trope in times of disaster, and thus we
have two of the three most common and essential elements of the Greek
bone transfer narrative already at this point in the story: some disaster
or need, followed by oracular inquiry.43 The “seeking” action implied by
the verb baqash here, combined with peney yhwh (“the face[s]‌of yhwh”),
implies a cultic context, in a temple or from an intermediary (see, e.g.,
Hos 5:15; 2 Chr 7:14).44 The oracular answer from YHWH points directly to
Saul’s alleged mistreatment of the Gibeonites, a group of “resident aliens”
(gerim) who had gained legal access to the land through deception during
the conquest (see Joshua 9).45 As gerim, the Gibeonites may have been le-
gally prevented from seeking financial redress for the wrong done to them
41. Kapelrud, “King David,” 301.

42. McCarter refutes Kapelrud’s thesis on the same grounds (II Samuel, 444). Moses
Buttenwieser compares the story in 2 Samuel 21 with Greek concepts, viz., the idea that un-
buried bodies would haunt the living (“Blood Revenge and Burial Rites in Ancient Israel,”
JAOS 39 [1919]: 303–21, here 308–9). He thus assumes the cause of the famine referenced
in 2 Sam 21:1 is the burial status of Saul’s and Jonathan’s bodies away from the family tomb
(313 n. 32). On the contrary, the narrator explicitly tells us that it is bloodguilt incurred from
killing the Gibeonites that causes the problem, though one can appeal, as Buttenwieser does,
to two competing sources in this account (e.g., one detailing the Gibeonite problem and an-
other regarding the famine itself). See also Raúl Quiroga, “La venganza gabaonita a la luz de
los conceptos actuales de justicia. Un estudio interpretativo de 2 Samuel 21:1–14,” DavarLogos
4 (2005): 117–29.
43. Malamat finds in a fourteenth-century bce Hittite text a pattern of a covenant being
broken in a past era, which results in a current situation of plague (“Doctrines of Causality”).
The Hittite story does not, however, involve a bone transfer of any kind; rather, the attempt to
remedy the situation comes through a formal apology for the past injustice. For the text, see
“Plague Prayers of Muršili II,” translated by Gary Beckman (COS 1.60:156–60).
44. Hans W. Hertzberg embarks on an extended discussion of the issue and provides some
oblique evidence that the site of the inquiry was the Gibeonite high place; see 1 Kgs 3:4, and
discussion in I & II Samuel. trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1964), 382–83, as well
as McCarter, II Samuel, 440.
45. E.g., Jehoshua M. Grintz, “The Treaty of Joshua with the Gibeonites,” JAOS 86
(1966): 113–26.
801
(2 Sam 21:4), the payment of human life thus being the only available op-
tion serious enough to address the issue.46
After the killings are accomplished, the mother of two of the victims,
Rizpah, embarks upon a mourning ritual in which she protects the bodies
from defilement. The reported length of the vigil may have been as long as
April to November (i.e., from the beginning of the harvest until the winter
rains), unless the phrase “water poured out from the sky” in 2 Sam 21:10
refers to late spring rains.47 Whether her vigil lasted an extraordinary six
to seven months or only a few days or weeks, her actions seem to motivate
David’s pity in 2 Sam 21:11, where the narrator explicitly connects David’s
cognizance of Rizpah’s ritual with the re-burial effort. To be sure, there is
a strong element of shame here for David. The exposed bodies can only
reflect badly on the new king in the eyes of any remaining supporters of
the Saulide regime, perhaps even garnering sympathy for the fate of Saul’s
house from those who would not be predisposed to feel this way initially.
David’s response, in this light, seems non-optional and cannot simply or
solely be described as a “personal gesture” of sympathy or other private
emotion.48 It is also important to note that the recovery of the bones entails
a long-distance procession, some eighty kilometers from Jabesh Gilead
(east of the Jordan River) all the way down to Gibeah (or, more precisely,
to the region of Zela just east of Gibeah).49 The final resting place of Saul’s
bones, then, ends up being around only three to five kilometers away from
both David’s capital in Jebus/Jerusalem and the territory of Gibeon, while
at the same time the bones rest safely within Saul’s own home.50 Moreover,
46. Blenkinsopp, Gibeon and Israel, 34, 136 n. 31; McCarter, II Samuel, 441–42; Baruch Halpern,
David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2001),  302–7.
47. If the famine was in fact caused by a drought, then the presence of the rain here may
signal the end of the natural disaster, and thus Rizpah’s ritual ends when the problem is
solved, prompting David to begin his response with the dead bodies.
48. Cf. Chavel, “Compositry,” 39.
49. McCarter assumes that David can only retrieve ashes and not bones in 2 Sam 21:12–
14, since in 1 Sam 31:12–13 the residents of Jabesh burned the remains (II Samuel, 443).
Cremation seems not to have been a typical Israelite burial practice, and it may be that only
the rotted flesh was burned away or even that some memorial fire was lit for the dead.
50. To be sure, the transfer can simultaneously be viewed as a normal placement of the body
in Saul’s patrimonial burial plot; e.g., Herbert C. Brichto, “Kin, Cult, Land and Afterlife—A
Biblical Complex,” HUCA 44 (1973): 1–54. The import of merely burying a charged figure
such as Saul should not, of course, go unnoticed; I am inclined to agree with Rachel Hallote,
who declares that the Israelite “cult of the dead” was “one of the most active domestic cults
in the biblical period” (Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World: How the Israelites and
8
11
David’s reclamation of the bones from a territory that had been demon-
strably hostile to his own claims of national power should be viewed as an
assertion of political dominance that presumably ended in a sort of truce
between David and the Gileadites, much in the way that the Spartan theft
of Orestes’s bones from Tegea marked a similar dynamic.51
David’s action thus serves several important purposes in mediating po-
litical strife and managing the “body problem” that Saul presents. He solves
both the Gibeonite problem and the problem of Saul’s surviving—and
possibly rival—heirs, while simultaneously honoring Saul and his family
with the patrimonial burial at Saul’s home in Gibeah. The political impli-
cation of bone transferral, viewed through the lens of the Greek examples,
adds nuance to Kyle McCarter’s well-known view of the so-called history of
David’s rise in 1 Samuel 16 through 2 Samuel 5 as an Israelite example of
the genre of Near Eastern royal apology comparable in narrative strategy
to the thirteenth-century bce Hittite “Apology of Ḫattušili.”52 The author of
1–2 Samuel goes to great lengths to show David’s innocence and deference
toward Saul and Saul’s family, while at the same time David engages in
actions that can be interpreted as shrewdly advancing his own progress up
the political ladder toward the kingship (e.g., marrying the king’s daugh-
ters, preparing to fight for opposing armies against Israel [1 Sam 28:1–2;
29:1–11], garnering a private army, and establishing a rival capital). In the
story involving Abner and Ishbaal referenced earlier (in 2 Samuel 3–4),
we find another instance of David using this strategy of political murder
and re-burial. After Ishbaal is killed by David’s men—recall that Ishbaal’s
Their Neighbors Treated the Dead [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001], 54). See also Elizabeth Bloch-
Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1992), 23. Cf. Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate
Victory of the God of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 60–63, who argues
for a deeply rooted ancient Israelite belief in life after death but does not think death cults
were as prevalent or influential as do many other recent interpreters.
51. As discussed by McCauley (“Heroes and Power,” 88–89), the Tegean surrender of the
bones could also be read as a conciliatory gesture of peace toward Sparta, and it is certainly
possible that the interaction between Jabesh Gilead and David operated with a similar ten-
sion between national reconciliation and lasting hostilities.
52. First identified as such by Leonhard Rost, Die Überlieferung von der Thronnachfolge
Davids (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1926). See the updated treatment by Andrew Knapp, Royal
Apologetic in the Ancient Near East (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), esp. 161–248, on David. In both
1–2 Samuel and the Hittite text, we find a historical narrative bent on showing divine guid-
ance leading the future king along the path toward eventual rebellion and success against
the current ruling powers (McCarter, I Samuel, 29–30). See “Apology of Ḫattušili III,” trans-
lated by Theo P. J. van den Hout (COS 1.77:199–204).
821
death formally cleared the way for David to become king—David enacts a
kind of bone transfer for his rival to a family tomb at Hebron (or rather,
a head transfer, as it is only the decapitated head that is re-buried [2 Sam
4:12]). The pattern here, when compared with the treatment of the bones
in 2 Sam 21:13–14, suggests a conscious political program, by which David
marshals the power of the bodies of his rivals, treating them like allies and
thereby attempting to neutralize the criticism that David himself has or-
chestrated all of the killings in question.
On the level of literary and cultural symbol, the dismemberment
of Saul’s body in 1 Samuel 31 signals an inexorable fissure in the lead-
ership of the country. Saul has been decisively cut off from his people
and his position of power.53 David’s reclamation of the bones, then, sig-
nals his authority over a newly stabilized nation. The incident reminds us
that Israel’s early monarchy was a dangerously fragile affair, and indeed,
monarchic rule did not override tribal factions, which were never truly
dissolved. Such a situation leaves David in a difficult position whenever
rival claims arise—such as those between Saulides and Gibeonites in this
instance. The two parts of the bone transfer drama here match the real,
dual threats facing the early Israelite monarchy: threat from surrounding
powers striving for regional hegemony (the Bible seems to imagine the
Philistines as the primary enemy in this role)54 and threat from within the
nation itself, born from the ethnic patchwork of nascent Israel.
Conclusion: An Ongoing Body of Power

I hope to have shown some avenues by which the trope of bone trans-
ferral and heroic power can be explored in the biblical texts that recount
the journey of Saul’s body after death. To summarize, Saul’s bone transfer
can be compared to the Greek materials on several fronts: a crisis prompts
an oracular inquiry, which leads to the retrieval of the bones of a hero and
the relocation of those bones, upon which a resolution to disaster follows.
Beyond these bare correspondences of plot, moreover, we have found
53. A similar observation is made by Michael Bryson, “Dismemberment and

Community: Sacrifice and the Communal Body in the Hebrew Scriptures,” RL 35 (2003): 1–
21, at 14. Note also the symbol of tearing Saul’s royal garment in 1 Sam 15:26–28, which oper-
ates on the same principle, and other actions of this type discussed in Chapter 5 of this book.
54. Peter Machinist, “Biblical Traditions: The Philistines and Israelite History,” in The
Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment, ed. Eliezer D. Oren (Philadelphia: University
Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 53–83, esp. 64–69.
813
serious political implications present in David’s actions, and the value of

the comparison here is that the Greek materials alert us to the presence of
these types of motives hidden just below the surface of the text, which are
often overlooked by biblical interpreters when reading this particular nar-
rative. There are nonetheless clear differences between the biblical story
here and the Greek bone transfer accounts: the oracle David receives (as
we now have it in the text) does not specifically stipulate the retrieval of
Saul’s—or anyone else’s—bones but rather points only to the cause of the
famine, and thus the bone transfer is a corollary, not the main act in the
drama.55
Nevertheless, the basic outline of the comparison and some of its
specificities are compelling and suggest that we posit some sort of
Mediterranean koine of heroic ideology and bone transfer ideology that
had become visible in Israel by at least the eighth–sixth centuries bce.56
The place of the bone transfer narrative in the ongoing lives of certain
prominent Greek heroes militates against Mobley’s argument that the he-
roic life of Saul does not have “a heroic conclusion.”57 On the contrary, he
shares the heroic fate of Oedipus, Theseus, Orestes, and others when his
bones are transferred as an object of power and political manipulation,
and thus the Deuteronomist has preserved an echo of Saul’s heroic iden-
tity even in the tragic tale of his death. The hero in ancient Mediterranean
literature is a profoundly unstable individual; as Nagy puts it in his sem-
inal study, the hero is antagonistic to the god who is most like him or her
in life, and only in death is the enduring fame (Greek kleos) of the hero
solidified through appropriate funerary ritual.58
55. However, based on the parallel texts involving heroic body transfer, one may speculate
that just such a command, through the oracle, had indeed been offered but is no longer a
part of the text as we have it. The Israelite focus on issues of defilement and honor regarding
bodies—enhanced in the case of heroic or important bodies—suggests that the role of the
body transfer was nevertheless an important one.
56. This language of a “Mediterranean koine” has also been invoked by Corinna Riva,
“The Culture of Urbanization in the Mediterranean c. 800–600 BC,” in Mediterranean
Urbanization 800–600 BC, ed. Robin Osborne and Barry Cunliffe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 203–32, at 203–4.
57. Mobley, “Glimpses,” 80. Preston contrasts Saul’s tragic, heroic death on the battlefield
with David’s slow decline in bed in 1 Kings (“Heroism,” 37–38, 41–44), even going so far as
to say that Saul’s death is “in defense of Israel,” while David dies “in his bed with the moral
fabric of Israel crumbling around him” (“Heroism,” 44).
58. Nagy, Best, 67–210.
841
Perhaps more than any other character in the Hebrew Bible, Saul em-
bodies this very process. Something in the order of the cosmos is rectified
when Saul’s body returns home under David’s protective care, and the
story of Saul, which stretches a narrative distance in 1–2 Samuel longer
than David’s own presence, finally ends only with the return of Saul’s
bones. Just as Saul thought he could be rid of his most difficult antagonist,
the prophet Samuel, and yet Samuel reached him from beyond the grave
(1 Samuel 28), so too does Saul’s memory and power continue to haunt
and manipulate David, even as David seeks in a final gesture to control a
scenario of frightening political upheaval with Saul’s own body. The story
of bone transferral that I have tried to re-tell here is thus very much about
David, but it is equally about the ongoing symbol of cult and politics em-
bodied in Saul’s bones and all that Saul represented as both victor and
victim throughout 1–2 Samuel: not simply a faulty, defunct, rejected chief-
tain but rather a body of ongoing heroic power in Israel.
815
Conclusion
Heroic Bodies Reimagined
In summary, I have made the following arguments in this book. On the

most basic level, permeating all the preceding chapters, I’ve wanted to
show that biblical authors paid explicit and sustained attention to heroic
bodies. Israel’s own namesake founder, Jacob/Israel, leads with his body
even before birth, then at his birth, and in all of his critical moments—
deceiving his father through fake-hairy arms; laying his head upon a
stone at Bethel, melding his body with the ancient cult site; grappling in
a close bodily encounter, ending in a limp, at Penuel; and in his last act,
“seeing” through his blindness and criss-crossing his arms to ensure the
system of mixed blessings and bodily misrecognitions continues into the
next generation. Judges, presenting us with Israel’s pre-monarchic heroic
era, is a deeply bodily book: left-handed, mutilating and mutilated, long-
haired, and murderous, its characters revel in bodies and violence. The
David and Saul drama, throughout 1–2 Samuel, juxtaposes the bodies of
the two kings and sets them on a collision course, overtly and, as I hope
I was able to show, on many subtler levels as well. Saul’s body continues
to act in strange and powerful ways beyond his death, and in the final epi-
sodes of Saul’s bone movement and re-burial(s), the last heroic body goes
underground.
Considering all of this body drama, I think it is fair to claim that the
Bible focuses on and exalts its heroic bodies as much as any reasonably
comparable corpus of literature from the Iron Age Near Eastern and
Mediterranean world—although a statement like this risks vapidity in
861
light of the question, What other “comparable corpus of literature” do we

actually have? As a body book, the Bible compares favorably with even the
Iliad, though the genre and length of the Greek epic make it quite a com-
pact and body-focused war story that still deserves more attention from
classicists than it has received on the terms of its bodies.
I have also suggested, at several points in particular (e.g., for Jacob, for
Saul, for David), that biblical authors created a type of “narrative physiog-
nomy” or “body-determinism” for some key characters, showing through
bodily cues how these characters would develop, live, and die—their
bodies predict their fate. The term “physiognomy” here is of course po-
tentially misleading, since as an actual cultic practice the physical cues
were first viewed and then used to make predictions about the future,
in real time. In a narrative, authors presumably had freedom to create,
craft, re-craft, and otherwise manipulate the material so that the bodies
and plots interacted with one another in a more organic and foolproof
manner. However, the effect during a reading experience is similar. Jacob
and Esau clash in the womb, and Jacob comes out “supplanting” his hairy-
mantled brother, accompanied by an oracle announcing the meaning of
the contest (Esau will serve Jacob). Saul’s height and David’s beauty, both
features being the first piece of information we learn about each char-
acter (even if not at birth), go on to circumscribe and predict their fate in
different ways.
The heroic bodies I’ve been describing in this book are not all the same
and cannot be organically considered as a group for any clear singular
meaning. Having said that, these bodies tell a story, or at least track with a
story—Israel’s national story, beginning with the composition of the nation
in the body of Jacob/Israel, the struggle to construct a national body and
the failure to come together as a whole, heroic body in the pre-monarchic
era of Judges, and then the ultimate triumph of David’s beautiful and ma-
nipulative body in Samuel. If the language used at points in this study con-
cerning the close relationship between the individual body and corporate/
national body is appropriate, then it should come as no surprise that these
two stories, the personal and the national, harmonize with one another.
Even so, the body conflict between Saul and David never really resolves in
a fully harmonious way, a portend for the monarchy itself and its eventual
failure. Even if the authors of Judges and Samuel drew upon very early
sources, perhaps even dating back to the shadowy times of these char-
acters themselves, most agree that the final editions of these texts must
result from after that monarchic failure (i.e., post-586 bce), meaning that
817
Conclusion: Heroic Bodies Reimagined 187
even the most robust heroic pictures of Saul and David were to be read
through that failure. Though my analysis of heroic bodies throughout the
chapters of this book has not always been able to situate the texts in ques-
tion within an exact historical frame—I am suspicious of the accuracy of
many of these supposed frames, and thus not willing to make major inter-
pretive decisions based on them—I have suggested something of a broad
story arc: from a single heroic body to many chaotic and competing bodies,
to a royal body, and then away from bodies, to the disappearance of heroic
bodies. The historical question, then, would be: to what extent does this
“story arc” diverge from, or map onto, “history”?
✢ ✢ ✢
What happened to Israel’s “heroic bodies” after the era of David? Did
they truly disappear—or were they transmuted into some other type of
body? Do the heroic “bodies” give way to heroic “minds”? The Psalms,
wisdom literature, and other examples from within the Kethuvim
(“Writings”), such as Ruth, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah, for example, have
been for many interpreters the parade examples of post-exilic literature
in the vein of “personal religion.”1 Without a nation, and without a king,
living heroic themes—specifically at the crucial intersection of warriors
and kings—fade into oblivion. Heroic bodies qua heroic bodies could, in
this literature, be appropriated, completely transformed for different pur-
poses, or even openly denigrated.
Consider, for example, the prophet Ezekiel’s presentation of dead war-
riors in Ezek 32:17–32.2 Here, in a presumably sixth-century bce context,
the author describes the downfall of the Egyptian army and flirts with he-
roic themes. In fact, the entire episode can be read as a mockery of heroic
afterlife ideals: a heroic lament (32:18; compare with 2 Sam 1:17–27), a de-
scription of the dead hordes going down into the afterlife, a comparison of
1. This topic has generated a lot of interpretation and debate over the past several decades,
and for the sake of simplicity here I conflate many different topics that could be treated in
their own rights—e.g., the nation and smaller instantiations of community and then the
emergence of an “individual” vis-à-vis those broader categories, the problem of “personal
religion” versus “state religion” or “family religion,” and so on. For some dimensions of all
this, see Susan Niditch, The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-
Babylonian and Persian Periods (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
2. I have analyzed this chapter, more fully along these lines, in Brian R. Doak, “Ezekiel’s
Topography of the (Un-)Heroic Dead in Ezekiel 32:17–32, JBL 132.3 (2013): 607–24, from
which elements of the following discussion are drawn.
881
the newly un-heroic dead with the ideal of heroic ancestors, the “Gibborim
of ancient times” (32:27), repeated invocations of the verb naphal (“fallen”),
faintly gesturing toward the conflation of gibborim and nephilim in Gen
6:1–4, and a reference to the fate of heroic bones (32:37; compare with
Saul’s bones in 1–2 Samuel, in Chapter 6 of this book).3 What happens
with these bodies, in the end? Nothing. They are relegated—as even Saul’s
body was not, ultimately, and the comparison is telling—to simple igno-
minious death, inert in the ground, with no power to terrify, evoke pas-
sion, or affect the land of the living.4 For all that, one may still detect a hint
of glamor, some echo of the power of the heroic body, in Ezekiel’s condem-
nation (otherwise, against what image of the heroic is the prophet’s own
portrayal constructed?). Over and against the image of the “heroic” impe-
rial army of Egypt, in Ezekiel 37 we read a stunning new bodily image: the
whole community of Israel, lying as dead as Pharaoh’s un-heroic horde
in the ground, revivified and stood up on their feet, a skeleton army, now
incarnated and breathing, ready for some new future. Putting these two
chapters (32 and 37) into interpretive dialogue produces a striking image
of the heroic body dying, and staying dead, and then of some new body
rising up in its place.
One could analyze the astounding scene in Isaiah 6 (as I did briefly
in Chapter 5 of this book) as demonstrating in a short space a similar dy-
namic: the death of the powerful king Uzziah ushers in a period of anxiety,
as the body of the king fails—but the prophet envisions the divine body,
immediately looming upward and dominating the physical space of the
temple, overshadowing the royal death and announcing a new era.
Does the “heroic body” truly disappear in obviously exilic and post-
exilic literature? And in what ways? And what replaces it? In one sense, we
might talk about this disappearance of certain kinds of bodies alongside
other themes of “hiddenness” in certain books, wherein humans cannot
3. There are textual problems with several key phrases in this passage; see Doak, “Ezekiel’s
Topography,” for discussion. Along with others (e.g., Ronald S. Hendel, “Of Demigods and
the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4,” JBL 106.1 [1987]: 13–26), I have at-
tempted to read themes in Gen 6:1–4, with overlap here in Ezekiel 32, as heroically oriented
in Bran R. Doak, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient
Israel (Boston: Ilex Foundation; Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012), 53–69,
188–94.
4. On the anti-mythic perspective of this text, see also Ellen F. Davis, “‘And Pharaoh Will
Change His Mind . . .’ (Ezekiel 32:32): Dismantling Mythic Discourse,” in Theological
Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs, ed. Christopher Seitz and Kathryn Greene-
McCreight (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 224–39.
891
always openly discern God’s mighty saving actions on earth. No divine

voice booms down, no divine hand saves, and in the case of the book of
Esther there is arguably no God at all. The mood of the Judges and Samuel,
during which time a rowdy band may overthrow kings and nations with
their bold bodies, would be off-putting indeed in Daniel, Esther, Ruth,
Lamentations, Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
The characters and speakers in wisdom literature mostly talk; true, Job has
a battered, suffering body, and the Proverbs evoke the breasts of the wife
of one’s youth. Songs is of course replete with at least the female body and
evokes the ideal man as well, but none of this is traditionally “heroic” ex-
cept in its frame evoking Solomon as king.5 Ruth barely has a body; Boaz,
at least, has “feet” at which Ruth may lie down. The arm of the Lord has
withdrawn to some other place. Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, while
not the worse theologically for their lack of Reed Sea partings and titanic
miraculous victories over the Assyrian army, feature a kind of quiet “her-
oism,” a leadership that takes the form of letter writing and Torah teaching
and cultural maneuvering in the face of larger dynamics of empire not
obviously under God’s control beyond the tiny politics of the new commu-
nity in Jerusalem.6 Consider, too, the way the book of Chronicles takes the
dynamic, tortured, bodily-fascinating role of the prophet and bends that
body into the shape of the scribe, the interpreter, and the reader.7
In a recent and major study Mark Smith raises the problem of the disap-
pearance of heroic poetry in ancient Israel—Smith believes the early “war-
rior poetry” in Judges 5, 1 Samuel 1, and other places was truly early, even
pre-monarchic in some cases (c. 1200–900 bce), and this warrior poetry
dominates Israel’s early literary landscape.8 Though these early warrior
themes could be reflected and reproduced later in other settings, according
5. However, it is possible to speak of an “ideal man” in the Songs, as does Jonathan Kaplan
in My Perfect One: Typology and Early Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 135–53, though he does not use the language of the hero or heroism.
6. E.g., Mark McEntire, Portraits of a Mature God: Choices in Old Testament Theology
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).
7. E.g., William Schniedewind, “Prophets and Prophecy in the Books of Chronicles,” in
The Chronicler as Historian, ed. M. Patrick Graham, Kenneth G. Hoglund, and Steven L.
McKenzie (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1997), 204–24. Compare with Mark S. Smith, Poetic
Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World
(Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 560 n. 20, who cites the transfer of the “spirit” (ruach)
motif from the Judges to prophets and holy men, as well as instances where prophets like
Elijah and Elisha seem to embody heroic ideals.
8. Poetic Heroes, 7–11, 313–32.
901
to Smith, no genuine “heroic poetry” was produced after the tenth century
bce, leading to questions about its demise. Did the eventual rise of a more
stable nation and its corresponding national God after the early period,
along with an explosion in textualization in the eighth century bce, lead to
de-emphasis on tribal, local heroic themes? Smith suggests these ideas in
various ways9 and cites an analogy with Greek materials—though we have
no clear “hero cults” in ancient Israel, as opposed to Greece (see Chapter 6
in this book on this), in both Israel and Greece poetry could serve as a “tex-
tual bridge” between older heroic worlds and later experience.10
This promising conceptual comparison with the Greek world regarding
the transformation and ongoing significance of heroic poetry and motifs
is one that could be explored through many other dimensions as well. For
example, specifically with relation to heroic bodies, we find many places
in the Platonic corpus were the body receives a specific demotion in favor
of the mind, reason, the soul, and so on. In the Symposium (210a–211c),
to choose but one text on this theme (the Phaedo also readily comes to
mind), Diotima instructs Socrates about the ladder of love he must climb,
first recognizing beautiful individual bodies, then considering all bodies
together as one conceptual body of beauty, then on to the soul’s beauty
as more valuable, to the beauty of activities and laws, then finally giving
birth to theorizing, wisdom, and the ultimate vision of Beauty as form,
upward, away from the earth.11 The transformation of motifs reserved for
warriors, such as those evoked by the Iliad, occurs in fascinating ways in
the Apology, as the philosopher Socrates replaces the hero of old with a
new hero, namely, the philosopher, one who engages in reasoned dialectic
(22b; 36d), or compares himself to Achilles in his own bravery in the face
of fear and danger (28b–d). Within the Homeric world of epic itself, the
action from Iliad to Odyssey makes a turn from battlefield-body themes
to “mind” or intelligence (noos), cunning, and trickery;12 in the Odyssey,
9. Smith, Poetic Heroes, 327–31.

10. Smith, Poetic Heroes, 322.
11. All references to Plato here are from Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997).
12. These themes are all treated in detail by Ari Kohen, Untangling Heroism: Classical
Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero (London: Routledge, 2014), passim, but esp. 37–56
on Odysseus and 57–125 on Plato and heroism, as well as Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek
Hero in 24 Hours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), esp. 605–83. See
also, e.g., Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
9
11
even Achilles (granted, after death) wishes for a “normal life,” and already
within the Iliad, in the epic’s culminating scene, the most savage warrior
must give up possession of the heroic body and begin a process of reflec-
tion that leads to his own death.
More work needs to be done on the question of the new, post-heroic
bodies that animate early Judaism—in what form are properly “heroic”
themes treated and disseminated, and for what purposes? My suggestion
here is simply that the move to thinking bodies, praying bodies, lamenting
bodies, interpreting bodies, reading bodies, writing bodies, and so on in
post-exilic literature signals at once an obvious historical transformation
and also a conceptual change in the way leadership functions. New heroes
will have new heroic bodies.
921
913
Index of Modern Authors (Selected)
Alter, Robert, 44, 47–48, 61–62, 74, Chavel, Simeon, 168–70, 180–81

76–78, 82, 136–37, 138, 141–42, Clines, David J. A., 20–21, 128–29, 148,
145–46, 149, 154, 155–56, 155, 159
157–58,  161–62 Coakley, Sarah, 11–12, 157–58
Amit, Yairah, 63–64, 67, 74, 94–95, Collon, Dominique, 100–2, 116–17
137,  166–67 Coo, Lindsay, 42
Anderson, John E., 38, 42–43 Cooley, Jeffrey L., 136–37, 141–42
Antonaccio, Carla M., 170–71 Cornelius, Izak, 100–2, 107–11
Asad, Talal, 9–10, 157–58 Creangă, Ovidiu, 20–21
Auerbach, Erich, 5–6 Cross, Frank M., 59–61, 64–65, 99–100
Bahrani, Zainab, 67–68, 135 Darshan, Guy, 170–71

Baker, Robin, 63–64, 89–90 Darwin, Charles, 12–13
Bal, Mieke, 63, 83–84, 94 Davis, Ellen F., 187–88
Balentine, Debra Scoggins, 160, 165–66 Davis, Lennard J., 18–20
Bell, Catherine, 7–8, 11–13 Davis, Whitney, 100–3
Berlin, Adele, 5–6, 45–46, 131, 157–58 Descartes, René, 7–8
Bianciotti, María Celeste, 11–12 Doak, Brian R., 23, 26, 37, 64–65, 107,
Blenkinsopp, Joseph, 139–40, 179–80 132–34, 145–46, 167–68,  187–88
Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth,  180–81 Douglas, Mary, 7–8, 10–12, 59, 95
Boer, Roland, 50–51 Durkheim, Emile, 7–9, 10–11
Boling, Robert G., 59–61, 68–69,
76–77,  177 Eagleton, Terry, 10, 13
Bonfiglio, Ryan P., 97–98 Echols, Charles L., 24, 65
Brenner, Athalya, 82, 131, 150, 151 Edelman, Diana V., 166–67, 176–77
Brueggemann, Walter, 136–37, 155 Edwards, Suzanne M., 85
Bryson, Michael, 182 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, 13–14, 17,
Bunnens, Guy, 109–13 20–21,  50–51
Butler, Judith, 11–12, 42–43 Exum, J. Cheryl, 153, 166–67
941
194 Index of Modern Authors (Selected)
Fewell, Dana Nolan, 17, 83–84, 152 Kohen, Ari, 23, 190–91

Foucault, Michel, 7–8, 11–12, 54–55 Kugel, James L., 28–29, 37, 45–46, 154–55
Freedman, David N., 64–65, 99–100
Frolov, Serge, 29–30, 134–35, 136–37 Launderville, Dale, 28–29,
61–62,  178–79
Garrison, Mark B., 105–7 LeMon, Joel M., 98–99, 100–2, 107–9,
Geary, Patrick J., 173–74 115–16,  117–18
George, Andrew, 3, 4, 47–48, 104 Lemos, Tracy M., 68–69, 160, 165–66
George, Mark K., 17, 126, 145, 161–62 Leuchter, Mark, 136–37, 139
Giffone, Benjamin D., 64, 138 Levenson, Jon D., 26, 180–81
Graybill, Rhiannon, 20–21, 25 Long, V. Philips, 166–67
Gunn, David M., 76–77, 80–81, 83,
139,  166–67 Măcelaru, Marcel V., 129, 131, 133–34,
139, 145
Halpern, Baruch, 59–61, 71–72, 76, Machinist, Peter, 27–28, 105–6, 182
80, 82, 125–26, 148, 156–57, Macwilliam, Stuart, 93, 129, 131, 150–51,
158–59,  179–80 152,  154–55
Hamilton, Mark W., 6, 17, 22, 25–26, Malamat, Abraham, 168–69, 179–80
31, 61–62, 126, 128–29, 141–42, 144, Marzouk, Safwat, 54–55
145, 156–57, 161, 168–69 Matthews, Victor H., 37, 59–61, 76,
Hamori, Esther J., 13–14, 15–16, 33, 80–81, 88–89,  145–46
48–49, 50, 51, 57 Mauss, Marcel, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 157–58
Hays, Christopher B., 67–68 Mayes, Andrew D. H., 59–61
Hays, Peter L. 55–56 Mazar, Eliat, 122–23
Hendel, Ronald S., 37, 39–40, McCarter, P. Kyle, 130–33, 136–37, 141,
49,  187–88 149–50, 158–59, 165–66, 176,
Hertzberg, Hans W., 130–31, 134–35, 178–80
136–37, 141, 145, 149–50, 179–80 McCauley, Barbara, 170–71, 173, 180–81
Hulster, Izaak J. de, 97–98 McCoy, Marina Berzins, 56–57
Humphries, W. Lee, 166–67 McDowell, Katherine L., 14–15
Hutton, Jeremy, 33, 50 McEntire, Mark, 188–89
McGuire, Meredith B., 11–12
Jordan, Mark D. 11–12 McWhorter, Ladelle, 11–12
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,  10–11
Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 61–62 Michael, Matthew, 140, 143
Kapelrud, Arvid S., 168–69, 178–79 Mobley, Gregory, 48, 65, 86–87, 88–89,
Kaplan, Jonathan, 20–21, 125–26, 90, 139, 140, 145, 147, 166–67, 183
155–56,  188–89 Moore, Stephen D., 14–15
Keefe, Alice A., 17–18
Keel, Othmar, 97–98, 111–15, 132–33 Nagy, Gregory, 28–29, 170–71,
Klein, Ralph W., 130–31, 136–37, 149, 150 183,  190–91
Knapp, Andrew, 181–82 Neal, Tamara, 55–56
915
Index of Modern Authors (Selected) 195
Negbi, Ora, 107–9 109–11, 118–19, 121–23, 128–29, 145,

Neis, Rachel, 42 157–58,  189–90
Niditch, Susan, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 47, Smith, Robertson, 87–88
48, 59–61, 70, 76–77, 80–81, 83, Sommer, Benjamin D., 15–16
86–89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 109–11, 117, Stavrakopoulou, Francesca,
177, 187 34–35,  168–69
Nihan, Christophe, 139–40 Sternberg, Meir, 74–75, 76–77, 129,
Nissinen, Marti, 139–40 130–31, 133–34, 137–38, 149,  156–57
Noble, John T., 47–48 Steymans, Hans Ulrich, 104–5
Noland, Carrie, 9 Stone, Lawson G., 75–80
Strawn, Brent A., 14–15, 26–27,
Olyan, Saul M., 18–19, 53, 54–55, 67–68, 97–98,  114–16
86–87, 151, 161–62, 168–69,  177–78
Taylor, Joan E., 2
Park, Suzie, 70, 71–73, 81–82, 94–95, Thurman, Eric, 20–21
134–35,  177
Polzin, Robert, 59–61, 133–34, 137 Uehlinger, Christoph, 97–98, 111–15
Popović, Mladen, 135
Preston, Thomas R., 138, 141–42, Vermeulen, Karolien, 63–64, 74, 77–79,
166–67,  183 80–81,  83
Raphael, Rebecca, 18–20 West, Martin, 28–29, 30–31

Ringmar, Erk, 62 Westermann, Claus, 36, 39, 42, 50, 57
Riva, Corinna, 183 White, Marsha, 126, 136–37, 148
Root, Margaret Cool, 106–7 Wilkis, Ariel, 9–10
Wilson, Stephen M., 20–21, 38, 86–87,
Sasson, Jack M., 59–61, 66, 68–70, 74, 93, 128–29, 131, 156–57
76, 77–78, 81–82, 83 Wilson-Wright, Aren, 64–65,  107–9
Schipper, Jeremy, 4, 18–20, 23, 45, 54, Winter, Irene J., 103–4, 105–6, 128–29,
62–63, 72–73, 151–52,  160–62 132–33,  149
Schniedewind, William, 188–89 Wright, Allen, 29–30
Seeden, Helga, 99–100, 107–9, 111–13, Wright, Benjamin G., 152–53
116–17, 118,  122–23 Wright, Jacob L., 65
Smit, Peter-Ben,  20–21 Wynn, Kerry H., 45–46, 53–54
Smith, Jonathan Z., 26–27
Smith, Mark S., 15–16, 24, 30–31, 50, Yadin, Azzan, 29–30
51, 52, 64–65, 92, 97–98, 99–102, Yee, Gale A., 83–84, 94–95
9
61
917
Index of Subjects
Abimelech, 84–85, 153 Benjamin (tribe), Benjamites,

Abner, 75–76, 143, 159, 177–78, 181–82 64, 72–73, 94–95, 130, 134–35,
Abram/Abraham, 15–16, 24–25, 34–36, 138, 177
37, 45–46, 54–55,  152–53 blindness, 41, 42, 45–47, 57–58, 72–73,
Absalom, 47, 93–94, 126, 128, 185
128–29,  156–58 bones, 6–7, 16–17, 35–36, 88–89, 120–21,
Achilles, 2–3, 30–31, 79–80, 90–92, 151, 145–46, 165–84, 185,  187–88
157–58,  190–91 breasts, 16–17, 80–81, 83, 153, 188–89
Achsah,  83–84 burial, 34–35, 50–51, 79–80, 90–92,
Adoni-Bezek, 63–64, 66–67, 68–70, 111–13, 118–23, 168–70,  171–72
80–81, 88–89,  160 buttocks,  103–4
Amasa, 75–76, 159
amputation. See dismemberment; cheeks, 3, 83, 104
mutilation clothes, clothing (robes, garments), 16,
arms, 2–3, 44, 99–102, 107–11, 116–17, 44, 47–48, 104–5, 111–13, 116–17, 127,
121–22, 123–24, 126, 153, 185, 188–89 145, 160, 161, 182
Asahel, 75–76, 157–58, 159 concubine. See Levite’s concubine
Assyria, 14–15, 67–69, 85, 99–100, crown, 86–87, 111–13, 126, 144, 145–46
105–6,  188–89
David, King, 6–7, 23, 39, 42, 61–62,
Baanah, 67–68, 75–76, 159, 160–61 67–68, 74–75, 94–95, 99–100,
beards, 3, 47, 103–4, 106–7, 122–23, 125–29, 131–33, 137, 140,
111–13,  160–61 143–46, 147–52, 154–63, 165–70,
beauty, 3, 4, 6, 16–17, 36, 85–86, 93, 104, 176, 177–84,  185–87
125–26, 128–29, 130–31, 137–38, 148, Deborah, 25–26, 64–65, 66, 80–82,
149–58, 162, 186, 190–91 84–85,  92
belly (stomach area), 73, 75–78, desire, 59–61, 125, 137–38, 152, 153,
80–81,  159 154–55,  156–57
981
198 Index of Subjects
disability, 18–20, 21–22, 42, 45, 46–47, hair, 2–3, 16–17, 39–40, 42–43, 44,
52–55, 62–63, 72–73, 160–62. 46–49, 58, 63, 86–94, 104, 109–11,
See also blindness 117, 127, 151, 153, 155–56, 161, 185, 186
dismemberment, 59–62, 63, 66, hands, 7, 9, 16–17, 25–26, 36, 44,
67–68, 70, 88–89, 94–95, 145, 50–51, 57–58, 63–64, 67–69,
158, 159–61, 165–66, 182. See also 70–75, 76–77, 78–80, 82, 83–84,
amputation; mutilation 85–86, 89, 94–95, 99–102, 106–13,
117, 121–24, 127, 134–35, 144, 153,
Eglon, 66, 70–71, 73–81 156–57, 185,  188–89
Ehud, 64, 66, 67, 70–73, 74–75, 76–80 left-handedness, 16–17, 57–58, 61–62,
Enkidu, 4, 30–31, 47–49, 90, 104–5, 117 63–64, 70–73, 74–75, 76–79,
Esau, 33, 37–38, 39–44, 45–46, 47–51, 94–95, 100–2, 103–4, 109–11,
56, 57, 58, 92, 151, 155–57, 161, 186 134–35,  185
Esther, 131, 152, 187, 188–89 thumbs, fingers, 63–64, 66, 67,
eyes, 7, 36, 41–42, 43, 57–58, 59–61, 68–69, 151, 153
63–64, 90–92, 127, 131, 149, 153, handsome, 3, 104, 130–31, 154–55.
154, 155–56, 162–63, 177–78. See also beauty
See also blindness head, 67–68, 82, 83–85, 86–87, 89–90,
93, 98–100, 106–7, 119–21, 127,
face, 2–3, 4–5, 50–52, 153, 179–80. 132–33, 144, 153, 158, 159–61, 165–66,
See also cheeks; eyes; mouth; nose 181–82,  185
feminine, femininity, 12–13, 18, 20–21, height, 6–7, 16–17, 103–4, 130, 132–38,
76–77, 81–82,  87–88 141, 142, 146–47, 149–50, 155,
foot/feet, 3, 15–16, 25–26, 63–64, 157–58, 162, 186. See also giants
67–69, 76–77, 82, 83, 93, 100–2, hero, definition of, 23–26, 79–80
104, 116–17, 119–20, 151, 153, 157–58, Hezekiah,  125–26
160–61,  188–89 hips, 33, 50–51, 55–56, 175–76
toes, 63–64, 66, 67, 68–69 Homer, 1, 2–3, 27–31, 42, 52, 55–56,
75–77, 190–91. See also Iliad;
gender, 4, 12–13, 18–19, 20–22, 26, Odyssey
80–81, 116–17, 128–29, 148.
See also masculine; feminine Iliad, 1, 2–3, 55–56, 67–68, 71–72, 75–76,
genitals. See penis; vagina 77–78, 79–80, 83–84, 90–92,
giants, 85, 127, 133–34, 146–47, 155–56, 157–58, 159, 185–86,  190–91
158,  159–60 Isaac, 38, 41–42, 43–47, 50–51, 56,
Gilgamesh; Gilgamesh Epic, 3, 4, 30–31, 153–54,  161
47–49, 90, 103–5, 117 Isaiah, 133–34, 144, 188
Goliath, 133–34, 145–48, 149–50, 155–56, Ishbaal, 75–76, 159, 160–61,
158,  159–60 177–78,  181–82
Greece/Greeks, 1, 2–3, 22, 26,
28–31, 42, 55–57, 67–68, 71–72, Jacob, 15–16, 21–22, 24–25, 33, 35–58, 62,
90–92, 166–68, 170–72, 173, 71–72, 129, 154, 155–56, 162, 174–75,
181–83, 185–86,  189–91 176, 186
9
91
Index of Subjects 199
Jael, 66, 80–85, 89–90, 92 prophets, 16–17, 25, 33–34, 40, 42,
Jesus, 2–3, 13–14, 33–34, 41 69–70, 81–82, 125, 127, 136–37,
Joab, 75–76, 94, 127, 159, 160–61 139–40, 143, 144, 148–49, 150, 155,
Joseph, 24–25, 28–29, 35–36, 37, 47, 161–62, 184,  187–89
50–51, 57–58, 77–78, 131, 154–55,
156–57,  174–76 Rachel, 36, 37, 152–53, 154–55, 161
Joshua, 25–26, 66 Rebekah, 38, 41, 44–45, 48–49,
Judith, 82, 85–86, 148 58,  153–55
Rechab, 67–68, 75–76, 159, 160–61
Leah, 37, 151, 152–53, 154–55 red (skin, hair; ruddiness), 39–40, 48,
Levite’s concubine (Judges 19–20), 66, 92, 131, 147, 149, 155–56
67–68, 88–89, 94–95,  156–57 running, 4, 148, 157–58
masculine, masculinity, 18, 20–21, 58, Samson, 33–34, 47, 48, 66, 67,
80–81, 87–88, 128–29, 148,  150–51 69–70,  86–93
Moses, 24–25, 34–35, 38, 39, 42, 52, Samuel (prophet), 86–87, 127, 136–37,
54–55, 61–62, 73, 131, 138, 141, 142–43, 145, 148–49, 158
162–63,  175–76 Sara/Sarai, 34–35, 36, 51, 80–81, 85
mouth, 16–17, 63, 74–75 Saul, 6–7, 23–24, 35–36, 58, 64, 69–70,
mutilation, 67–70, 79–80, 90–92, 94–95, 103–4, 125–51, 157–58,
160–61, 165–66, 185. See also 160–63, 165–70, 173–84,  185–88
amputation; dismemberment sex, 4, 6, 12–13, 16–17, 18, 26, 47–48,
76–77, 80–81, 83, 150, 152–53,
Nazir/Nazirite, 48, 86–90, 127 154–55,  156–57
neck, 25–26, 44, 73, 103–4 sight. See eyes; blindness
nose, 15, 153 Sisera,  81–83
nudity, 116–17, 139, 145, 151 skin, 44, 58, 156–57
Socrates,  190–91
obesity. See weight Solomon, 81–82, 125–26,  188–89
Odyssey, 1, 2–3, 42, 190–91 standing, 80, 98–99, 107–9, 116–17,
Oedipus, 171–72, 183 145–46, 158,  159–60
Orestes, 172, 173, 180–81, 183 stomach. See belly
swords. See weaponry
penis, 16–17, 50–51, 116–17, 151,
156–57,  188–89 Theseus, 172, 173, 183
Persia, Persians, 106–7 thigh, 50–51, 76–77, 153
Philistia/Philistines, 6–7, 59–61, Tiresias, 42
90–92, 122–24, 127, 141–42, 143, toes, 63–64, 66, 67, 68–69
145, 146–47, 157–58,  159–60
physiognomy, 1, 40, 135, 186 ugly, 125–26, 128, 151, 154
Plato, 35–36,  190–91 Uzziah, 127, 188
priests, 16–17, 20, 41, 57, 73, 86–87,
151,  172–73 vagina, 16–17,  76–77
02
200 Index of Subjects
weaponry, 51, 55–56, 68–69, 77–78, 82, swords, 25, 37, 74–75, 76–79, 84–85,
85–86, 89, 102–3, 111–13, 117, 118–23, 122–23, 157–58,  159–60
141, 145, 147, 157–58, 160, 166–67 weight (obesity, heaviness, etc.), 73–74,
armor, 84–85, 144, 145, 146–47, 75, 76–80, 127, 131
157–58,  159–60 women. See feminine, femininity
dagger/knife, 16–17, 76–77, 106–7, wrestling, 15–16, 37, 48–49, 51, 52,
118–19,  122–23 53–54,  57
helmet, 111–13, 117
slings, 72–73, 94–95, 147, 159–60 youth, young, 42–43, 57–58, 85, 130–31,
spears, 2–3, 75–76, 94, 102–3, 109–11, 132–33, 147, 149, 150, 154, 157–58
114–15, 118–19, 120–21, 144, 145–46,
147,  166–67
201
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1. Bodies and Heroes 1

Judges 3:15–​30: Ehud the Left-​Hander, Eglon the Fat King 70

Bone Transfer in the Saul Narrative 174

Index of Modern Authors (Selected) 193

3.1 Philistine bichrome vessel with painted figures

4.10 Anat or Astarte (?) on damaged stele;

narrow my focus down to the explicitly described bodies of heroic figures

With regard to the question of method, particularly regarding the ten-

In summary, the book proceeds as follows: In Chapter 1, I examine

placement of this iconography chapter is an archaeological affirmation

Chapter 6 first appeared as a small seed of an idea in my dissertation-​

in the Harvard Theological Review in 2013. I’m grateful for permission to

AJA American Journal of Archaeology

RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum

In this book I make three overarching arguments about what I am

2 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

Surpassing all other kings, hero endowed with a superb

4 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

All his body is matted with hair, he is adorned with tresses

4. George, Gilgamesh Epic, I, 545.

scribes were relatively rare and expensive. In the cuneiform literatures

7. Sabine Melchior-​Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. K. H. Jewett

6 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

larger level of social assumptions about bodies, exploding outward to the

Religion and the Body: A Brief Genealogy

8 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

Nevertheless, Durkheim’s focus on “belief” as the ultimate center of

10 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

As such, the body is inextricably and arbitrarily bound up with one’s

scholarship employing “body theory” in some capacity. The anthropolo-

12 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

body, canonized in Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992)

way.38 This insight overlaps with the postmodern project of dismantling

Embodied Biblical Studies

14 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

The enormous amount of philosophical or theological attention paid to

work comparing the “image” language of Genesis 1 with ancient Near

16 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

and present on earth.48 As Smith points out, however, and in contrast to

Body Trajectories in Recent Hebrew Bible Research

18 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

Though disability theorists articulate their methods in a range of ways,

20 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

could very well be considered as impaired by any number of illnesses

the history of masculinity studies beginning with Freud’s contention that

22 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

66. Hamilton, Body Royal, 2–​3.

24 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

26 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

(following George Hunston Williams) calls a “luminous particularity,” that

72. Hamilton, Body Royal, 9.

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

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Judges 3:15–30: Ehud the Left-Hander, Eglon the Fat King 70

Chapter 6 first appeared as a small seed of an idea in my dissertation-

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4 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

4. George, Gilgamesh Epic, I, 545.

7. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. K. H. Jewett

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66. Hamilton, Body Royal,  2–3.

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26 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

72. Hamilton, Body Royal, 9.

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Bible—as the subject of a classical-style academic inquiry.82 Inevitably,

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12. Compare with the scene of wrestling as a heroic sport in 2 Sam 2:14–17.

38 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

Hairy and Smooth, Part One (Genesis 25:21–26)

40 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

Hairy and Smooth, Part Two (Genesis 27:1–40)

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The description of Jacob as “smooth”/chalaq may carry with it valences

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46 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

All his body is matted with hair,

48 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

during Enkidu’s fateful journey to full-human status with the Shamhat

49. George, Gilgamesh Epic, vol. 1, 172–92.

55. Hamori, “Echoes,” 633–34 on the hair in particular.

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60. Hamori, “Echoes,” 629–30, on this aspect of the story.

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80. McCoy, Wounded Heroes,  22–25.

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like.83 The intentionally criss-crossed hands of blessing come as more of

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Heroic Bodies in Judges 61

grand cyclical fate of Israel in Judges (sin and oppression—return to the

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trans-temporal family wedded to Christ). 9 The appropriation of this con-

Heroic Bodies in Judges 63

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Judges 1:1–7: Adoni-Bezek’s Dismembered Body

Heroic Bodies in Judges 67

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be read as some form of “ritual violence”—that is to say, following the

Heroic Bodies in Judges 69

relegated to dog-status beneath his table.34 In one of the more attentive

70 Heroic Bodies in Ancient Isr ael

of war? Perhaps the simplest narrative sense would assume Adoni-Bezek’s

Judges 3:15–30: Ehud the Left-Hander,

40. Niditch, Judges,  39–40.

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Heroic Bodies in Judges 73

Right (Side/Hand),” giving us an odd juxtaposition. We must therefore